At first glance, news that the Biden administration has reached an agreement with Mexico to take back migrants from Venezuela who have been arrested for illegally crossing the southern border sounds like a big deal.
If the new policy is that all Venezuelans will be returned to Mexico after illegally crossing the border, where they will then be allowed to pursue their asylum claims as they wait in Mexico, then that would be a positive development. It would mean President Biden was finally returning to President Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, albeit for just one country.
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Unfortunately, that is not what the new policy is.
What the new policy does do is extend the Biden administration’s existing Title 42 policy to Venezuelans. Previously, the Biden administration was catching and releasing all Venezuelans caught at the southern border into the United States because Mexico refused to take them back and the United States doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Venezuela.
Under the new policy, Mexico has agreed to take migrants from Venezuela returned through Title 42 authority back into Mexico.
Sounds like a huge win right? All Venezuelan migrants will be returned to Mexico now! That means word will spread and they’ll stop coming, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, Biden created huge loopholes in his own Title 42 policy on the first day of his administration and has only made those loopholes bigger over time. On his first day in office, he exempted all unaccompanied minors from Title 42, and then weeks later he extended the loophole to all families.
So the only people Biden’s Title 42 policy actually applies to these days are single adults. This is why the percentage of migrants processed through Title 42 has fallen from 82% in Trump’s last month in office, to just 36% this August. Biden has been slowly rolling back Title 42 his entire term. Venezuelans who are traveling with children, therefore, will still be released into the country under Biden’s new policy.
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Biden’s Department of Homeland Security also announced that it will be allowing 24,000 Venezuelan migrants a year to cross the border legally at a port of entry and make an affirmative case for asylum (those who cross illegally can also claim asylum, but it is claimed as a defense to deportation).
Twenty-four thousand may sound like a lot until you realize that 25,000 migrants from Venezuela were arrested for illegally crossing the border just this August alone. And those 25,000 were part of a much larger 200,000 total. In other words, the new port of entry plan is exceedingly small and will do nothing to redirect the flood of Venezuelans illegally crossing the southern border.
