In yet another impressive display of decisive leadership, President Joe Biden is reportedly now wavering on his decision to end the use of Title 42 to deny migrants entry into the United States starting May 23.
“Biden officials recognize they’re in a jam,” Axios reports. “Moderate Democrats are pounding on them to delay the repeal but doing so would inflame the party’s progressive base. That includes members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who are scheduled to meet with the president next Monday.”
The thing is, though, Biden already partially repealed Title 42 over a year ago, and his refusal to reimplement President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in its place is why the border has gotten worse ever since.
The demise of Title 42 actually started in November 2020 when a Clinton-appointed judge in Washington, D.C., held that Title 42 did not empower the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to expel minors from the U.S. The plaintiff in that case was a 16-year-old from Guatemala, so the judge’s order staying expulsions under Title 42 was limited to unaccompanied minors — not applied to all migrants.
The Trump administration appealed that ruling and won in January, but as soon as Biden was sworn into office, he ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop expelling unaccompanied minors. There obviously isn’t any scientific reason why unaccompanied minors are less of a threat to spread COVID-19 than families or single adults, but the CDC later wrote a 21-page opinion justifying that conclusion.
After Biden exempted unaccompanied minors from Title 42, the number of unaccompanied minors arrested after illegally crossing the southern border surged from 3,600 in December 2020 to 18,900 in March 2021.
Also soon after Biden became president, the Mexican state of Tamaulipas suddenly decided to stop taking back migrant families expelled under Title 42. Instead of finding a way to make Tamaulipas cooperate as they had under Trump, Biden just decided to let these families stay in the U.S. As a result, the number of families arrested after illegally crossing the southern border surged as well.
In December 2020, just 12,000 migrants in families were arrested after crossing the southern border illegally. By August 2021, that number had skyrocketed to 86,000.
Not all families are being exempted from Title 42. In August 2021, for example, 17,000 migrants who were arrested as families were returned to Mexico under Title 42, while over 73,000 were processed into the U.S.
To be clear, Title 42 has not been fully repealed. All single adults are being expelled under Title 42, and many families are too.
But many families are also being allowed into the U.S. to go wherever they want, and all unaccompanied minors are being processed by DHS and placed with sponsors in the U.S.
A full repeal of Title 42 will assuredly cause a flood of migrants of all ages to the southern border, making the existing crisis worse. But lawmakers should also be aware that Title 42 hasn’t been fully implemented for over a year now.
