President Joe Biden said Friday the Title 42 policy at the southern border will end on May 23, but both U.S. senators from West Virginia say that is a mistake and it will create a possible record surge of immigrants.
“Through policy decision after policy decision, President Biden has created a crisis that is about to balloon into a full-blown catastrophe,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said Friday after Biden announced the end date.
“Rescinding the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Title 42 Authority will put our Border Patrol agents in an even more dire situation," the state's junior senator said. "Since March of 2020, Border Patrol has been able to expel migrants quickly and efficiently using this authority. Our facilities are already well over capacity, and without Title 42 Authority, the crisis on our southern border will become even worse. Our immigration system is not designed for persistent irregular mass migration that will result from this poorly thought-out decision.”
Capito and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have been trying to convince the Biden administration to leave Title 42 in place, but to no avail.
Capito said during a virtual press briefing from her Washington office Thursday there is “already chaos at the border and this (ending Title 42) will just unleash more people who have been waiting to come into the country. We are on track to have 2 million people coming into this country at the southern border.”
Illegal immigration will soar, she said, and that also means more drugs, like deadly fentanyl, will enter the country.
Title 42 lowers those numbers, she added, and the Biden administration has provided no other deterrent to keep people from coming to the border.
“People are waiting in Mexico for Title 42 to go away,” she said, and that could mean a surge “much larger than we have ever seen.”
Title 42 was put into place in 2020 and kept in place by Biden as a reaction to the pandemic. It is a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation that says the pandemic presents a public health reason to bar people from entering the country and allows the government to send migrants back to their home countries as soon as they are apprehended without asylum proceedings.
The only exception has been for unaccompanied minors.
However, with the pandemic easing and the availability of vaccinations, the question of whether Title 42 is still justified has surfaced, and the Biden administration is still sticking to the May 23 date to end it.
Manchin also blasted Biden’s announcement Friday.
“Today’s announcement by the CDC and the Biden Administration is a frightening decision,” he said in a statement. “Title 42 has been an essential tool in combatting the spread of COVID-19 and controlling the influx of migrants at our southern border. We are already facing an unprecedented increase in migrants this year, and that will only get worse if the Administration ends the Title 42 policy. We are nowhere near prepared to deal with that influx. Until we have comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform that commits to securing our borders and providing a pathway to citizenship for qualified immigrants, Title 42 must stay in place.”
Manchin said that in fiscal year 2021, encounters with migrants reached an all-time high of 1.7 million people, which is four times higher than the 400,000 encounters reported the previous year, and the United States is on pace to set a new record again this year. Through the first five months of fiscal year 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has experienced more than 838,000 migrant encounters.
Earlier this week, Manchin also sent a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky asking her to extend the Title 42 policy due to rising Covid-19 cases across the globe and record migrant encounters.
Manchin said Title 42 has been a valuable tool during the pandemic, but the threat is not over.
“With encounters along our southern border surging and the highly transmissible Omicron BA.2 subvariant emerging as the dominant strain in the United States, now is not the time to throw caution to the wind,” he said. “I urge you to again renew this common-sense policy that has been in effect – under both Republican and Democratic administrations – since March 2020.”
Kate Bedingfield, White House communications director, said in news reports earlier this week an “influx” is expected when Title 42 is lifted.
“We have every expectation that when the CDC ultimately decides it’s appropriate to lift Title 42, there will be an influx of people to the border,” she said. “And so we are doing a lot of work to plan for that contingency.”
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), over the course of 2021 Border Patrol agents carried out 1,111,609 expulsions under Title 42, including over 150,000 parents and children traveling as a family.
“The broad use of Title 42 has not only had a negative effect on asylum seekers, it also paradoxically served to increase the number of border crossings,” the DHS said. That’s because it has created a situation in which many people expelled back to Mexico make at least one additional attempt to cross the border.
The DHS said it is implementing a comprehensive strategy to address a potential increase in the number of border encounters.
According to the agency’s website, “The strategy includes: 1) Acquiring and deploying resources to address increased volumes; 2) Delivering a more efficient and fair immigration process; 3) Processing and removing those who do not have valid claims; and 4) Working with other countries in the Western Hemisphere to manage migration and address root causes.”
In its fiscal year 2022 appropriations bill, Congress provided an additional $1.45 billion for a potential Southwest border surge.
“There is broad agreement that our immigration system is fundamentally broken. The Biden-Harris Administration continues to call on Congress to pass legislation that holistically addresses the root causes of migration, fixes the immigration system, and strengthens legal pathways,” the agency said.