As hundreds of thousands of migrants headed toward the US southern border in anticipation of the end of Title 42 on May 11, 2023, Team Biden sent open border leftists into a fury by announcing it was instituting a policy similar to that of the Trump era which requires migrants to first apply for asylum in other countries they are trekking through before applying in the US.
Title 42, instituted under President Donald Trump in 2020, enabled the US to quickly return illegal aliens to their native countries for the sake of public health. As a result, more than 2.5 million illegals have been removed from the US after crossing the border.
The Biden administration announced that a first group of 550 U.S. troops have been sent to the US-Mexico border to support immigration enforcement.
Former President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post: “Hundreds of thousands of people will be pouring into our Country from ‘parts unknown’.
“There will never have been anything like it. Many will be from prisons and mental institutions. Congratulations to the Radical Left Democrats for having destroyed the USA. Today we become A THIRD WORLD NATION!!!”
Biden’s DHS expects some 400,000 migrants to arrive at the border every month after Title 42 ends.
As Title 42 expires on Thursday, Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “is now preparing a memo that will direct Customs and Border Protection to begin releasing migrants into the United States without court dates or the ability to track them, according to three sources familiar with the plans”, NBC News reported.
Previously, migrants had been enrolled in a program, Alternatives to Detention, which required them to check in on a mobile app until they were eventually given a court date. The new policy would release them on “parole” with a notice to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office but without enrolling them in the program.
A DHS official said the new policy is being instituted in order to free up space in the federal agency’s detention system. Thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens will be directly released onto US streets so that more migrants can fill detention centers along the border.
The director of an El Paso migrant shelter said he is “expecting the worst” when Title 42 ends.
“Well, the reality is that we’re overwhelmed. We’ve got several partners within the community. All of the emergency shelters are operating at or over capacity, and to give you an example of our situation with the Opportunity Center for the Homeless, we’ve got 200 inside the shelter, and we’ve had up to 810 outside the shelter camped in the alley. So, it truly is a humanitarian crisis”, John Martin, director of the Opportunity Center for the Homeless, told MSNBC’s “José Díaz-Balart” broadcast on May 8, 2023.
“This all started for us a little over a week-and-a-half ago when we saw the influx come in, and then it’s exponentially increased. And it is prior to the lifting of Title 42, and we are expecting the worst. We are hearing numbers anywhere from 500 to 1,000 to 1,500, and it just depends upon the source that you’re talking to. The difficulty that we have is that we’ve got a mix of individuals and/or families as it relates to the processing, some of which that have gone through it, many of which that have not, and they’ve been relying on either the CBP One app or they’ve been trying to file their applications online. But most recently, we found that you’re not able to travel if you go through the online process or also what’s referred to as the pro se. So again, that means they’re staying in El Paso”, Martin said.
Meanwhile, in a major policy reversal, the Biden administration finalized and published in the Federal Register on Wednesday a rule which disqualifies migrants from applying for asylum in the US if they neglected to first apply for asylum in other countries they traveled through, such as Mexico. Those who run afoul of the rule will be prohibited from applying for asylum in the US for five years.
Hundreds of asylum officers were trained in how to enforce the rule on Tuesday ahead of Title 42’s expiration, reports say.
According to internal training documents, only migrants with “exceptionally compelling circumstances” will be able to overcome the rule’s asylum bar. Those include migrants with an “acute medical emergency,” those who face an “imminent and extreme threat” in Mexico and victims of “a severe form of human trafficking”.
When Trump implemented the rule, Biden had called it “inhumane”.
“This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country”, Biden said during the final debate of the 2020 campaign. “That’s never happened before in America”.
The American Civil Liberties Union said it will file a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s rule.
“We will sue as we did under Trump”, Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s top immigration lawyer, told CBS News on Tuesday. “The core illegality is the same”.
Nearly 20,000 people signed an ACLU petition demanding the Biden administration abandon its plans to issue the new policy.
Team Biden “just ushered in a new period of immense suffering for people already enduring violence and persecution. He has closed off the possibility of asylum in the United States to the majority of people seeking safety – in contradiction with our nation’s laws and values. In doing so, he is finishing Trump’s job rather than fulfilling his own campaign promises”, Jonathan Blazer, director of border strategies at the ACLU, said in a statement. “This is a somber day for our country and for refugees in desperate search of safety, but the fight is far from over”.
The new Biden policy will affect the thousands of migrants who pay huge sums and risk their lives to travel through the Darien Gap, which links Panama and Colombia, on their way to the US border.
“The journey is punishing. Migrants hike for several days over mountains in dense jungle contending with biting insects, venomous snakes, torrential rains and mud-slicked mountain passes. Swollen rivers sweep away those who slip. Bandits rob and sexually assault migrants”, The Associated Press reported. “Still, nearly 250,000 people did it last year and the United Nations projects another 400,000 could attempt it this year”.
Many of the migrants who trek the Darien Gap fled Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, but others come from more distant countries, the AP report said.
Yu Tian traveled from Wuhan, China, to Hong Kong, and then to Ecuador where he boarded a bus to Colombia. “Hundreds of thousands are leaving China”, said the tourism guide turned migrant.
At the Ecuador-Colombia border, migrant trafficking groups recruit customers by telling them “right now you can go cross to the United States”, said Pedro de Velasco, a member of the KINO initiative, a binational nongovernmental organization at the U.S.-Mexico border, who traveled to the Ecuador-Colombia border to see why so many were arriving.
The smugglers charge US$10,000, “but don’t tell them they’re going to be expelled”, he said.
According to an estimate from Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the Biden administration has released close to five million border crossers and illegal aliens into the US interior since taking office, a foreign population that exceeds the populations of 28 states.
