Current and former U.S. border officials are warning of an impending crisis at the southern border due to the Biden administration’s immigration stances.
Tens of thousands more Central Americans and Mexicans are being encountered by Customs and Border Protection federal law enforcement personnel at the U.S.-Mexico border each of the past few months than the same period a year ago. But national security officials are sounding the alarm that this surge is just a preview of what is to come in late January and February.
“The numbers are going up for one reason: because of the Biden effect,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Officials cited two mechanisms that the Department of Homeland Security implemented on the border as the only things preventing a surge of illegal immigration, including people who seek asylum at ports of entry. They fear both will be wiped out in five weeks and leave Border Patrol agents unable todetain people safely and risk public safety by releasing untested people into the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Title 42 and Remain in Mexico program — if he does away with them, then we’re back to a surge in,” said Homan.
Attempted illegal entries have jumped over the past eight months from 17,000 in April to 70,000 in November. Officials said the thing that is keeping the immigration system from collapse is CBP’s ability, under a mechanism known as Title 42, to return people to Mexico immediately after they illegally crossed the border instead of holding them in detention. Title 42 was in response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that no one be held in confined spaces in order to avoid spread of the coronavirus.
Second, the Remain in Mexico program, or Migrant Protection Protocols, was implemented in 2019 and blocks migrants from seeking asylum at crossing points. Migrants must wait in Mexico for months before seeing a U.S. judge in a border court.
“[If] those valves are just turned on completely, you will see a global crisis within a couple of weeks,” CBP acting Commissioner Mark Morgan said in a call with reporters Monday.
Morgan warned in June that CBP may see an increase in migrants fleeing their home countries in Mexico and Central America due to economic peril prompted by the pandemic and recent natural disasters.
“I would speculate that it’s both [push-and-pull factors],” said former acting CBP Deputy Commissioner Ron Vitiello. “We don’t really know — you have to talk to people who are coming. But there’s clearly a change in policy afoot.”
In an interview at the border in October, Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the Washington Examiner that a multitude of factors have led people to migrate to the United States. The most common reason that his agents hear when interviewing people in custody is economic downturn back home.
Homan dismissed it and said migrants’ claims that they are now fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico are unfounded because violence in the region has not gotten worse over the past six months, but more people have traveled to the border.
“I don’t think there’s much of a push factor because if the violence is that bad, why didn’t many go to Mexico? Why didn’t they flee to another country? They just stopped because they knew they couldn’t get it because of the MPP,” said Homan.
“These numbers are rising because people know that we’re going to go back to the old policies, and that’s advantageous if you are in a third-world country like Guatemala and the economy’s tanking and there’s not enough work, and you know it’s dangerous because the cartels run the show,” said Vitiello, who pointed to the emergence last week of a new caravan headed to the border. “That wouldn’t have happened four months ago.”
Biden has endorsed opening a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, closing privately run immigrant detention centers, restarting asylum processes at the border that President Trump has largely shuttered, and a 100-day moratorium on deportations.
“If you had a moratorium on deportations, you shut down a lot of ICE detention. If you’re not going to be detained, you’re not going to be deported, there’s going to be no more work-site enforcement operations, we’re gonna give you your free healthcare, including COVID treatment, why would you not come?” Homan said.
The surge in illegal immigration comes despite the completion of 430 miles of border wall under the Trump administration. Since January 2017, the government has installed several hundred miles of 18-foot and 30-foot steel border wall, most of it in places that had inferior and dilapidated fences, and 300 more miles are under construction or in the planning phase. The 730-mile project will cost $15 billion — $10.5 billion of which was redirected from Defense and Treasury appropriations.
The Biden transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
