After Title 42, the deluge? Title 42 ends today, perhaps sparking the largest incursion of the world’s excess into a single country in history. Trump says the day will live in infamy. Even Joe Biden admits there will be “chaos.” Consider the following:
- 15,000 Haitians are waiting in Reynosa, Mexico
- More than 6,000 migrants are waiting in Tijuana
- Matamoros is receiving 2,000 per day
- Up to 15,000 migrants wait in Juarez
- 80,000 Venezuelans are headed to border
All told, anywhere from 700,000 to one million illegal migrants, waiting along the US border with Mexico, are expected to flood across, now that they cannot be turned back through the outgoing CDC policy.
What will replace Title 42? A long-used protocol called Title 8, which allows migrants reaching the U.S.-Mexico border to be apprehended and questioned about their grounds for admission into the country. If they express fear of return to their home country, they are referred for a credible fear interview with an asylum officer. Of course, virtually all have been schooled to express that fear, because those who do not can be immediately sent back with a five-year ban on returning. Those who defy the ban can be criminally charged. That is one difference from Title 42 removal, which involved no ban.
In a last-ditch effort to appear responsive to the crisis, the Biden administration added a couple of new rules just yesterday, the day before the planned abandonment of Title 42. One newly added rule was that the “asylum seeker” must apply at a port of entry using a special smart phone app (on the theory that all modern problems can be solved just by an app). Another is a revival of another Trump-era policy, which requires that an asylum seeker who had passed through a “safe third country” on the way to the U.S. needs to have applied for asylum there, not in the United States.
Of course, those rules beg the question of what happens when, as is the usual case, a migrant illegally crosses the border between official ports of entry after traveling through who-knows-what other countries. Joe Biden is rarely right about anything, but his prediction of “chaos” seems spot on. The reluctance of his administration so far to enforce the existing laws suggests strongly that no rules significantly reducing the expected influx will be enforced.