Pandemic-era rule expelling migrants at the border will terminate on May 23
A pandemic-era program that expelled migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border due to the coronavirus outbreak will officially end on May 23, the Biden administration announced on Friday, drawing praise from Democrats and immigration groups but placing new pressure on a government already faced with record migration flows.
The end of the Title 42 program means that families and adults crossing the U.S.-Mexico border will now be treated the way they were before the pandemic began, processed at U.S. facilities instead of being immediately returned back to Mexico.
“This is how the department is statutorily authorized to manage the border, and this is how border management and processing occurred before the COVID-19 pandemic. And so we will be returning to the ordinary status quo,” an official from the Department of Homeland Security told reporters.
But the agency is preparing for the end of Title 42 to increase migration flows even further, with homeland security officials bracing to handle up to 18,000 arrivals per day.
“We are coordinating across the whole of the government to ensure we are prepared for any potential increase in border encounters that result,” the official said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that the department would be returning to “standard procedure” by processing arriving migrants within DHS facilities.
“We have put in place a comprehensive, whole-of-government strategy to manage any potential increase in the number of migrants encountered at our border,” Mayorkas said. “We are increasing our capacity to process new arrivals, evaluate asylum requests, and quickly remove those who do not qualify for protection. We will increase personnel and resources as needed and have already redeployed more than 600 law enforcement officers to the border.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the end of Title 42 on Friday “following a thorough reassessment,” the health agency said.
“After considering current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19, such as highly effective vaccines and therapeutics, the CDC director has determined that an order suspending the right to introduce migrants into the United States is no longer necessary,” the CDC said.
DHS officials emphasized that Title 42 expulsions would continue up until May 23.
Complicating matters for the agency is where the migrants are coming from: over 40% of encounters at the border are coming from countries outside of Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, known as the Northern Triangle, another senior DHS official told reporters on Tuesday.
“One of the key challenges we’re facing today is that we’re seeing really large numbers of Cuban nationals, Nicaraguan nationals, and again, increases in Venezuelan nationals at the border,” the senior DHS official said.
“Those nationalities are particularly challenging in terms of processing at the border,” the official added, “because of the real lack of relations our U.S. government has with those nations.”
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 10:52 AM with the headline "Pandemic-era rule expelling migrants at the border will terminate on May 23."
