BIDEN TRAPPED ON BORDER. There is word that President Joe Biden is looking for a way out of his decision to end Title 42, the Trump-era regulation that allows U.S. authorities to turn back illegal crossers at the U.S.-Mexico border on the grounds of protecting the country from COVID. Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced that Title 42 will be repealed on May 23.
But now Axios reports Biden is wavering in that decision. Top aides are discussing the possibility of delaying repeal. The reason is obvious. Administration officials predict ending Title 42 will result in a flood of illegal crossers arriving at the border — as many as 18,000 each day, according to a scenario from the Department of Homeland Security. The administration will no longer have the means to turn them away on public health grounds and does not have the resolve to turn them away by simply enforcing immigration law or requiring them to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are considered. And the midterm elections are coming with Democrats already in deep trouble and voters unhappy with the administration’s handling of the border.
That has set off Democratic panic on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. “The White House is looking for ways to buy time to avoid a massive influx of migrants that would add to already-historic border numbers,” reported Axios’s Hans Nichols and Jonathan Swan. “That already endangers Democratic incumbents in states that could decide the Senate majority in November.”
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More and more Democrats are coming out in opposition to lifting Title 42. Sens. Jon Tester of Montana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Chris Coons of Delaware, and Gary Peters of Michigan have all called on Biden to change course.
“Right now, we have a crisis on our southern border,” Kelly told Fox News last week. “Right now, this administration does not have a plan. I warned them about this months ago. It’s going to be — to be honest, it’s going to be a crisis on top of a crisis.” Kelly and some of the other Democrats have signed on to a bill that would force the president to put off lifting Title 42.
Biden’s problem, of course, is that a very loud, very influential part of the Democratic base wants him to end Title 42 and has been pushing him to do so ever since he became president. When Biden announced the move, Democratic Rep. Raul Ruiz, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said, “It is long overdue to completely end the Trump-initiated Title 42 policy and stop using the pandemic as an excuse to keep it going. … End Trump’s Title 42 now.”
In some circles, it’s enough simply to identify something with former President Donald Trump as sufficient reason for opposing it. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is one of those circles. Other parts of the Democratic base are, too. They’re all putting pressure on Biden to stick with the plan to rescind Title 42. So the president has one group of Democrats telling him to put it off and another telling him to go ahead.
Meanwhile, the crisis at the border is getting worse even before the end of Title 42. In recently filed court papers, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said its agents apprehended 221,303 illegal border crossers in March. That is more than four times the average number of crossers in March for the last decade. According to the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli, U.S. officials turned away 123,304 of the crossers last March, mostly through the use of Title 42. But officials released more than 80,000 illegal crossers into the United States.
When Title 42 is gone, the overall number of migrants is expected to go up exponentially, while the percentage the U.S. turns away will go down. Just listen to the way the Department of Homeland Security talks about how U.S. officials will handle migrants. DHS is moving quickly to “more efficiently process migrants,” the department said, with more staff “deployed to the border to facilitate processing.”
What the department means is that while some migrants will be removed, a very large number will be “processed” and moved into the U.S. Rather than seeking some way to stop the flow of illegal border crossers, the administration is looking to create smoother ways to facilitate their entry into the country.
It is coming. The White House knows it, the Department of Homeland Security knows it, and Congress knows it. They also know that voters are already unhappy with Biden’s handling of the border crisis — public approval of his performance in that area is usually in the 30% range, with disapproval ranging around 60%. It could make a bad midterm election outlook much, much worse. And that is why the White House is looking for a way out. But this is a mess of the president’s own creation. He will have to live with it.
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