Lawmakers Push Back on Ending Title 42
Image: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a measure yesterday to block the Biden administration from ending a pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42.
📅 Background: First introduced by the Trump administration in March 2020, Title 42 allows border agents to turn away migrants at the southern border on grounds that they might bring Covid into the US.
- The policy has been used over the past two years to turn away ~1.7 million migrants – more than half of all illegal crossings – even when they were asking for asylum, a request usually allowing migrants to stay in the US long enough to plead their case before a judge.
🏛️ That brings us to last week… when the Biden administration announced plans to end the policy by May 23, because “there is no longer a serious danger” that migrants would introduce or spread Covid.
- The announcement was met with immediate pushback from Republicans and a handful of Democrats, who questioned whether Biden had a plan in place to deal with a potential mass migration event that could occur after ending the program.
- The attorneys general of Arizona, Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop the Biden administration from rescinding Title 42.
🇺🇸 The big picture: US Border Patrol apprehended a record 1.7 million migrants in the fiscal year 2021, and are currently on pace to surpass that total this year.
- There’s no penalty for expelling migrants under Title 42, which has led many to attempt repeat crossings in hopes of eventually making it through – with each attempt counted separately by the USBP.
- Per DHS figures, as many as 38% of migrant encounters during some parts of last year were individuals who had already been turned away at least once in the past 12 months.
Should the US end Title 42?
From the Left
- A majority of Democrats either strongly approve (31%) or somewhat approve (29%) of the Biden administration’s plan to end Title 42.
Source → (MorningConsult)
“If Republicans – and even some Democrats – want no COVID-19 restrictions, then why complain about ending Title 42?
The folks furious about President Biden finally ending the health clause are the same ones who want no masks, no vaccine requirements nor any other type of COVID-19 mandates.
Yet, they’re going to court to use the COVID-19 restriction to keep expelling most border crossers.
That doesn’t make any sense – logically, anyway.
On Monday, Arizona, Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration to stop the White House from ending Title 42 by May 23.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich called Biden’s move “a ridiculously poor decision with a bad intention for border states and American communities across the country.”
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmit bluntly said Title 42 is “a crucial tool for controlling the influx of illegal aliens at our Southern border.”
Title 42, which former President Trump invoked in 2020 to expel most border crossers in the name of containing the spread of the virus, has nothing to do with COVID-19 anymore.
What a bunch of hypocrites – all of them.
They say ending Title 42 will lead to a flood of border crossers, which in fact may be the case. But what does that have to do with COVID-19?
Even Arizona Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly are warning Biden against ending the “border restrictions without a comprehensive plan” to secure the border.
What does that tell you? That once again the border is just a campaign prop in the hunt for votes.
Title 42 is just the latest Republican tool to paint Democrats as “open border” supporters, who’d let cartels and human smuggling flood America with foreigners and drugs.
Fact is both Trump, a Republican, and now Biden have expelled most border crossers under the COVID-19 pretense.
Still, not everyone nor all the drugs are stopped from getting to American consumers.
But that has nothing to do with COVID-19. These politicians better come up with other ways to control the U.S.-Mexico border.”
“It's past time to say good riddance to Title 42: It was bad policy during the Trump administration, and it has been bad policy under Biden. Title 42 is legally questionable and morally indefensible. Its use put migrants in danger under the dubious justification of public health…
From the start, Trump's invocation of Title 42 was driven by politics, not by legitimate health concerns. In fact, when the Trump administration sought to implement the law, the CDC doctor who oversaw the regulation refused to comply.
Instead, then-Vice President Mike Pence used his authority to issue an order closing the borders to migrants…
Title 42 was always a border control measure masquerading as public health policy. Covid-19 was already rampant in the US by the time the policy went into effect, and the law was never applied to air travelers or US citizens crossing the border. It was only used as a pretext for keeping out migrants who were mostly brown, Black and economically vulnerable…
Part of what made Title 42 so morally reprehensible is that it placed thousands of migrants in harm's way. A 2021 research team for Physicians for Human Rights found that people expelled under the measure were subjected to violence once they were returned to Mexican border cities. And Title 42 has been applied inconsistently: Refugees from Ukraine have been allowed to claim asylum at the border, while those from Haiti have been expelled and sent back to unsafe conditions at home. This glaring double standard is simply unacceptable.
Now, with Covid-19 restrictions being lifted across country, there's even less justification for continuing to keep Title 42 as US policy. For all these reasons, the rescission of Title 42 cannot come soon enough.”
From the Right
- An overwhelming majority of Republicans either strongly disapprove (78%) or somewhat disapprove (10%) of the Biden administration’s plan to end Title 42
Source → (MorningConsult)
“With 1 million in just the first half of the year, and with the peak migration months not yet begun, the Border Patrol is overwhelmed. The flow of illegal border crossers increased virtually from the moment President Joe Biden took office after campaigning on a platform of allowing more illegal crossers to stay in the United States. Biden has made good on his promise, allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal crossers to stay, relocating them on secret flights to cities all around the country.
It has been a crisis since Jan. 20, 2021. Now, Biden proposes to make it much, much worse. In the coming days, the administration will lift Title 42, a Trump-era measure that allowed the U.S. to turn back illegal border crossers on grounds of protecting the country against the coronavirus pandemic. Left-wing activists and open-borders advocates have been pressuring Biden to end Title 42 ever since the administration began. Biden resisted in the first year of his presidency. Now, he will give in to the pressure…
It is coming. It will not be a natural disaster, not an earthquake or hurricane. It will be a man-made disaster, with the man, in this case, being Biden. And that, of course, will have political repercussions. "The stakes are high, from both a humanitarian standpoint and a political one," wrote the New York Times. "Democrats do not want the southwest border to appear out of control in the months ahead of the midterm elections, which would fuel more Republican attacks on the Biden administration's border policies.”
Appear out of control? How about be out of control? That is what the next months, at least, hold on the U.S.-Mexico border.”
“Joe Biden brought on the surge of migrants at the U.S. border, and it’s about to get bigger.
The White House will end Title 42 — a Trump-era CDC policy that turned away asylum-seekers to prevent the spread of Covid — on May 23, removing the last defense against a complete deluge at the border. According to U.S. intelligence officials, there could be another 170,000 migrants at the border in short order…
Biden has dismantled or curtailed most of Trump’s policies that succeeded in getting control of the border, and has reaped the whirlwind. According to Border Patrol, it has encountered an astonishing 1 million migrants over just the last six months. To keep that from going higher, the administration has kept Title 42 in place, even though immigration activists hate it…
It’s possible to imagine grounds for keeping Title 42 — more than 500 people a day are still dying of Covid and public-health authorities warn of the risk of new variants. But as mask mandates have dropped around the country and Covid has waned, the case for Title 42 has grown increasingly attenuated and presumably will continue to do so. It was never supposed to be simply an immigration-control measure, and we shouldn’t have to look to the CDC for the authority to exclude illegal immigrants from the United States.
Title 42 wouldn’t be such a crutch if Biden would re-embrace other Trump measures, from expedited removal — allowing the rapid expulsion of illegal immigrants who have been here less than a year — to the Safe Third Country agreements that were used to get migrants to apply for asylum in other Central American countries. The most important such measure was the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), or “Remain in Mexico”...
At the border, as elsewhere, the best rule of thumb under Joe Biden is simple — it’s going to get worse.”
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