President Joe Biden visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday for the first time as president, amid controversy and backlash about the administration’s allocation of resources to the southern border. The visit came days after he announced a new, restrictive policy that would essentially expand an immigration program referred to as Title 42, despite promising to end the program when he ran for office.
Title 42 was created to address public health and social welfare and grants the government the ability to take emergency action in numerous ways, including to “stop the introduction of communicable diseases.” While the code has been in place for decades, it was used widely beginning in March 2020 by the administration of then-President Donald Trump in order to regulate border crossings under the premise of increased COVID-19 precautions.
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The Trump administration used Title 42 to “essentially to override immigration law that allowed people to ask for asylum after entering illegally and said we could send them back” across the border, arguing that taking migrants into custody in federal facilities would create more of a public health risk, Theresa Cardinal Brown with the Bipartisan Policy Center told the PBS NewsHour’s Nicole Ellis in a conversation.
Watch the conversation in the player above.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) invoked Title 42 at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, it gave border patrol agents the authority to expel migrants to their home country or the country they were last in, which was often Mexico.
Since 2020, there have been more than 2 million expulsions of migrants by U. S. Customs and Border Protection at the southern border using Title 42. This is due, in part, to recidivism: people trying to cross the border illegally, getting caught and sent back before trying again. Cardinal Brown says recidivism rates are higher than we’ve seen in “many, many decades. And we do believe that Title 42 was one of the reasons why we saw people trying multiple times, [which] increased the numbers.”
Bypassing the asylum process and sending migrants back to Mexico without due process immediately after their arrival to the U.S. didn’t deter them from attempting to cross or re-cross the U.S.-Mexico border in many cases, in part because “it pushed people back out of the country without any consequence to future immigration applications.”
Many people arriving at the southern border are “hoping for help and protection. Legally, they may not qualify for asylum, but that level of desperation is something that we can’t simply rely on punitive and deterrent measures to reduce,” she added.
The sheer numbers of people crossing the southern border have also affected how border officials do their jobs and prompted advocates and local communities to highlight insufficient resources there.
Border officials want to see “a policy from Washington that they believe will really address the work that they have been challenged to do, which is essentially taking people who are seeking asylum and having to care for them, take them in, deal with humanitarian issues and families and kids in facilities that are not structured for that,” Cardinal Brown said.
Local officials and advocates on the ground have done their best to manage the flow of people, but are ultimately “hoping the federal government will kind of reimburse them some of those moneys and say, hey, this is a federal problem, but these localities have had to deal with it and the federal government needs to come in and help us manage this,” Cardinal Brown said.
The Biden administration’s initial attempts to end the use of Title 42 at the border in 2022 stalled after a group of states sued, taking the case to the Supreme Court. The high court agreed to hear the case, but is requiring the government to keep Title 42 in place in the meantime.
