Biden administration to lift Title 42 border policy

Pandemic-era policy allowing migrants to be turned away at border will end May 23.

Donald Trump tours the border wall at Calexico, California, in 2019. Picture: AFP

The Biden administration plans to end its use of Title 42 – a Trump-era pandemic border policy that allows the government to immediately turn away migrants at the southern border – by the end of May.

Border officials have expressed concern that without the rapid-turnback policy, they will quickly be overwhelmed by migrants, leading to dangerous overcrowding in border facilities and releases of people into the US who would normally be jailed or deported.

A draft of the order, which the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention plans to issue later this week, says it is taking the step because “there is no longer a serious danger” that migrants would introduce or spread Covid-19 inside immigration detention facilities. The CDC is delaying the implementation of the order until May 23 to allow the Department of Homeland Security to prepare for what the government anticipates will be a sharp rise in crossings this northern spring.

The CDC faces a Thursday deadline to decide whether to end the policy as part of the administration’s periodic review, which it has conducted every 60 days.

President Joe Biden, asked Wednesday at the White House about Title 42, said: “We’ll have a decision on that soon.”

Once Title 42 comes to an end, the government will once more need to consider any asylum claims made by migrants at the border, which requires briefly detaining them before they can be released into the US or deported.

Under Title 42, any migrant asking for humanitarian protection could still be expelled back to Mexico or deported to another country without a consideration of their claims, though in practice Mexico limited how many people it was willing to take back.

In recent weeks, with the CDC’s deadline looming, the administration came under intense pressure from many Democrats to end the policy and restore the asylum process at the border.

“Migrants have been cruelly expelled from our country under the guise of Title 42,” said Representative Juan Vargas, a California Democrat who represents the US-Mexico border. “Title 42 was never about public health and safety – it was implemented to deny due process to people seeking refuge and protection.”

Several moderate Democrats, however, broke with their party, calling on the administration to maintain it until they have a comprehensive plan to handle high numbers of migrants.

The Wall Street Journal