Two of the Biden administrations most visible defenders of lax border enforcement are now quietly helping shape the future of one of the nations most sensitive border-security tools inside Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
According to Breitbart Texas, former Biden-era officials Jason Houser, who served as Chief of Staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Troy Miller, who was Acting CBP Commissioner under President Joe Biden, have been brought into a select group tasked with recommending upgrades to the Trump-era National Targeting Center (NTC). Their participation has stunned at least one senior insider, who questions why officials closely associated with record-setting illegal border crossings and systemic security failures are now advising the current CBP Commissioner on a core national-security program.
Records reviewed by Breitbart Texas show that Houser who has publicly branded Trumps immigration agenda as racist and Miller who repeatedly echoed thenHomeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkass insistence that the Biden border was closed to irregular migration joined a Tuesday meeting with senior Trump administration CBP officials to discuss potential changes to the NTC. The meeting, which brought together veterans of the prior administration with two of its fiercest critics, underscores the extent to which Biden-era policymakers are being reinserted into the enforcement architecture they once worked to dismantle.
The National Targeting Center is the nerve center of CBPs pre-screening operations, analyzing traveler data and intelligence to identify high-risk individuals before they ever board U.S.-bound aircraft. It cross-references passenger manifests against federal databases, watchlists, and no-fly lists, serving as a critical line of defense against terrorists and transnational criminals seeking to exploit the air domain.
The internal source, however, questions how Houser and Miller can credibly claim to improve high-risk traveler screening when their own tenure coincided with glaring lapses in border security. A House Judiciary Committee report, the source notes, documented that nearly 100 individuals on the terrorist watchlist were inadvertently released into the United States at the southwest border during the Biden-Harris years, when both men held prominent roles within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The source, who is not authorized to speak publicly, suggests that financial incentives may be driving the decision to embed Houser and Miller in this high-level project to modernize NTC technologies. Both men now hold leadership positions at George Mason Universitys Rapid Prototyping Research Center (RPRC), which, according to its own materials, partners with major federal contractors to develop and recommend technology solutions for government clients.
By leveraging their academic affiliations, the pair have effectively rebranded themselves as neutral experts despite their highly partisan records on immigration enforcement. The GMU centers business model advising agencies on technology improvements that often lead to lucrative contracts raises questions about whether policy failures are being rewarded with new influence and potential consulting windfalls.
For frontline CBP personnel who endured the chaos of the Biden-Harris border policies, the source says, the inclusion of Houser and Miller in such a sensitive national-security effort feels like a direct insult. There is no one more publicly critical of the Trump administration efforts to enforce immigration laws than Houser, hes appeared time after time alleging the current efforts to arrest illegal aliens are based on skin color and not existing immigration law, the source told Breitbart Texas.
Housers record in the media underscores that assessment. During a June 2025 appearance on MSNBCs Deadline: White House, he attacked Trump administration enforcement operations in Los Angeles in sweeping ideological terms, telling host Nicolle Wallace, Lets just level-set this now, the incidents in LA over the last few days is not just over an issue or activity over the last 48 to 72 hours or few days, it is a build up over 100 days now of short sighted sort of, quite frankly racist policies directed by the White House.
He went further, accusing federal agents of targeting the most vulnerable rather than dangerous criminals. Houser claimed the Trump enforcement efforts in Los Angeles were quota-driven and aimed at non-criminal migrants, sometimes grandmothers, vulnerable populations, children, those that cant even possibly be removed.
In April, Houser again took to left-leaning media to denounce Trump-era enforcement, this time on MS NOW, where he criticized the deportation of known MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Salvadoran national, now facing human-smuggling charges, was removed by the Trump administration, a move Houser dismissed as Purely political theater.
Housers posture toward immigration enforcement drew sharp scrutiny on Capitol Hill in May 2025, during a heated exchange with Representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). Gill confronted Houser over a New York Times editorial in which the former ICE Chief of Staff had described interior enforcement efforts away from the border as dangerous political theater, pressing him on whether he understood the real-world consequences of lax enforcement.
Gill asked Houser if he knew who Gilberto Avila-Jara was, then informed him that Avila-Jara was an illegal alien arrested in April and charged with more than twenty counts of sex crimes against minors. The Texas congressman drove home his point with a blunt indictment of Biden-era policies, telling Houser, These were the kind of people that Joe Biden and under your leadership were coming into our country.
The source argues that Millers presence on the NTC expert team is no less troubling than Housers, given his central role in implementing the Biden administrations open-border agenda. Miller worked hand in hand with former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to streamline the processes that opened the border. His catch phrase of implementing decompression strategies at the border was just a code word for releasing more illegal aliens as quickly as possible, the source added.
Millers public record reflects a consistent effort to downplay the scale of the crisis even as illegal crossings shattered historic records. In 2021, he stood alongside Mayorkas in Del Rio, Texas, as the secretary claimed to be surprised by the sudden arrival of more than 30,000 mostly Haitian nationals who had poured into the small border town.
At a press event held at a Del Rio port of entry, Miller reinforced the administrations narrative that the border was not open to illegal migration, despite the obvious reality on the ground. The spectacle of tens of thousands of migrants massed under a bridge, overwhelming local resources and federal agents, became one of the defining images of the Biden border crisis.
The Del Rio episode later spiraled into a manufactured scandal when progressive activists and media outlets falsely accused Border Patrol agents on horseback of whipping Haitian migrants. Despite video evidence and eyewitness accounts debunking the claim, President Biden seized on the narrative, vowing that the agents would pay, and the White House allowed the smear to linger for months.
Miller, rather than defending his own agents, appeared to lend credence to the accusations in an internal message. In an email to employees, he wrote that he was shocked by the images from Del Rio of Horse Patrol Units that have dominated the media in recent days, according to a report by Fox News, language that many agents interpreted as a presumption of guilt rather than a defense of due process.
As reported by Breitbart Texas, a subsequent DHS investigation cleared the agents of the whipping allegations, confirming what many on the ground had said from the beginning. The source says the episode remains a bitter memory for rank-and-file personnel who felt abandoned by their leadership as the Biden administration and its allies in the media vilified them for doing their jobs.
Those agents were placed on leave and endured months of worry after being accused of something they knew they did not do. How someone like Miller, who played such a prominent role in the issue, is now supposed to be trusted to recommend changes to NTC is unbelievable, the source added, arguing that his actions revealed a willingness to sacrifice his own workforce to appease political pressure from the left.
Beyond rhetoric, Millers CBP implemented structural changes that dramatically expanded the flow of migrants into the United States under the guise of orderly processing. Under Mayorkass direction, CBP modified the CBP One mobile application to serve as a gateway for a mass-parole scheme that allowed up to 1,400 migrants per day to enter through select land ports of entry.
These migrants, often subjected to minimal vetting, were quickly released into the interior to pursue asylum claims, effectively turning a smartphone app into a ticket to the United States. The program, which critics argued amounted to a shadow immigration system bypassing Congress, remained in place for two years until President Trump terminated it in January 2025.
Breitbart Texas reported that some migrants admitted under the CBP One parole scheme said they were not asked any substantive questions about the legitimacy of their asylum claims before being released. Such accounts reinforced concerns that the administration had prioritized rapid processing and numerical decompression over meaningful security screening and fraud prevention.
Miller also oversaw the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHVN) parole program, another large-scale release mechanism that operated largely outside public view. Over three years, CHVN facilitated the admission of approximately 532,000 migrants through U.S. airports, again under parole authority that critics say was stretched far beyond its intended, case-by-case humanitarian use.
That program, too, was shut down by the Trump administration, which has sought to dismantle the web of parole pipelines and administrative workarounds that defined Bidens border strategy. For conservatives who favor a return to traditional enforcement and respect for statutory limits, Millers central role in these schemes makes his new advisory position on NTC reforms particularly alarming.
The source contends that Houser and Miller were able to re-enter the national-security apparatus at CBP precisely because they cloaked themselves in the shrowd of academia. By embedding within George Mason Universitys Rapid Prototyping Research Center, they gained a veneer of technocratic neutrality that obscures their ideological track records and policy failures.
According to the source, their involvement may not yet be widely known beyond CBP headquarters, but it is inconceivable that their presence is unknown to current CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott. CBP policy at headquarters, as reviewed by Breitbart Texas, requires that the Commissioner be informed of any headquarters-level meetings, work groups, or programmatic activities involving entities external to CBP.
That requirement suggests Scott was at least notified that former Biden officials now operating under an academic banner would be participating in high-level discussions about the future of the National Targeting Center. For critics, the question is not whether the Commissioner was informed, but why he would accept the participation of officials whose policies coincided with unprecedented border chaos and documented security lapses.
The episode highlights a broader pattern in Washington in which officials who preside over failure are rarely held to account and often reappear in advisory roles, think tanks, or academic centers that feed back into government decision-making. For conservatives who believe border security is a core sovereign duty, the quiet rehabilitation of Houser and Miller inside CBPs most sensitive targeting shop raises serious concerns about whether the lessons of the Biden-era crisis are being learned or deliberately ignored.
Randy Clark, the author of the original report, is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol who retired as Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations in the Del Rio Sector, overseeing nine stations along one of the most volatile stretches of the southwest border. His account, grounded in both documentary evidence and insider testimony, underscores a reality that many in Washington would prefer to downplay: the same architects and defenders of the Biden administrations open-border experiment are now being entrusted to fix the very systems their policies helped undermine.
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