Border Officials Say There’s No Plan after Title 42 Ends

Democrats stripped border control to the bone, hoping to promote their “humane” border policy (which actually creates very inhumane circumstances for migrants). They kept one thing, however: Title 42, which during the height of Covid allowed the government to turn away people trying to cross the border illegally, as a public-health measure. The White House has used the Trump-era order as a crutch for its lack of an immigration policy, hoping to hide behind the Covid-related regulation.

Now, with Title 42 slated for termination in May, administration officials are learning the hard way that even some border control is necessary.

In a Politico and Morning Consult poll, 55 percent of participants said they opposed the Biden administration’s lifting of Title 42 while only 35 percent supported the White House. A whopping 52 percent of independents said they opposed removing Title 42. Biden, who already has cringe-inducing approval ratings, receives especially abysmal marks for immigration. In a recent Ipsos poll for ABC News, Biden had only a 37 percent approval rating on immigration, with a dismal 60 percent disapproval. Immigration was his third worst rating, after inflation and gas prices. Even Democrats — especially those up for reelection in the fall — are calling on the president to reconsider lifting Title 42 until there’s a plan in place to control surging migrant encounters.

Americans’ disapproval of the president is rooted in a disturbing reality: The border is in crisis, and that crisis is about to get much worse. As I wrote last week:

With the lifting of Title 42, the Biden administration will probably be overrun by migrants at the border. It’s already bad; the DHS is currently reporting an average of 7,100 daily encounters, up from 5,900 in February, and is bracing for a “mass migration event” of up to 170,000 encounters in the days and weeks after May 23. Axios reported that, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the worst-case scenario would be 12,000 to 18,000 encounters a day.

Already, due to Biden’s open-door messaging, the border is encountering record numbers of asylum-seekers, overwhelming and derailing Border Patrol operations. Jim Volscko, a former Customs and Border Protection officer, told me that Border Patrol is not understaffed, it’s “overtasked.”  “They’re no longer doing their job,” he told me. “All they are [doing] is transporting the ‘give-ups’ and processing to release.” One Texas trooper told me “they got [Border Patrol officers] changing diapers.”

With an average of 7,100 encounters a day, Border Patrol officers are spending all their time processing asylum claims, leaving the rest of the border especially porous to the delight of smugglers and cartels. During my trip to the southern border last week, one Texas Department of Public Safety officer told me that these are the “bad people,” coming in: “They would have turned themselves in at a port of entry.” These are “people that don’t want to get caught,” he told me. 

When Title 42 is lifted, opening the door for even more asylum claims, the crisis will only get worse.

Indeed, everyone I spoke to at the border — from law-enforcement officers, to landowners, to private citizens — had one word to describe a post–Title 42 border: disaster.

One Border Patrol agent, who was loading up a group of asylum-seekers to be processed, laughed when I asked if the Biden administration had a plan to deal with the impending crisis: “Not that they’ve told us,” he said.

Local law enforcement is bracing for unprecedented strain. Sheriff Brad Coe of Kinney County in Texas told me that repealing Title 42 is a “mistake.” The border will be overrun, he told me: “there’s a lot of people out there [in Mexico] waiting for [Title 42] to go away.”

With only six deputies and a budget proportional to his 3,600 residents, Sheriff Coe is worried about a surge in crime. “We’ve filed 527 criminal charges since January,” he said. Coe alsonis worried about a food crisis in the surrounding communities. When the 15,000 Haitians arrived in Del Rio, Texas — just 30 miles from Sheriff Coe’s community — in September, grocery stores were cleaned out to feed the asylum-seekers. “How humane is it to the people that actually live in Del Rio,” he asked me.

Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez of Val Verde Country said the Biden administration has no plan in place for a post–Title 42 border. “If there was a plan in place, that would have done something a long time ago.” Sheriff Martinez’s county consists of 3,200 square miles, including 110 miles of border, and is patrolled by eight to twelve CBP officers at a time. He believes the number of officers has dropped with Border Patrol tied up with processing asylum-seekers. In turn, he’s being faced with a higher number of smuggled people passing through his county.

Of course, maintaining Title 42 as the sole source of border control has its problems. For one, when migrants are turned away under the order, they have an incentive to merely try to cross again. Or to be smuggled in. This creates repeated headaches for law enforcement, which is already being worked to the bone as migrant encounters surge.

Legally, maintaining Title 42 — a provision meant for public-health emergencies — seems inappropriate as the pandemic wanes. As Charlie Cooke wrote:

Title 42 of the 1944 Public Health Services Act does not grant the president any permanent powers; rather, it is an emergency measure that permits the executive branch to take measures against the “introduction of communicable diseases” from foreign countries. Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration have proposed that the provision was activated by the existence of COVID-19, and that, when applied to contemporary immigration law, enabled the federal government to expel foreigners who cross the border illegally without processing them under regular order or considering their asylum claims. Naturally, this assertion has been contested. But we do not actually need to reach its merits in order to grasp that, without there being an underlying “communicable disease” to prevent, Title 42 cannot come into play at all. Why is President Biden rescinding the order? Because the order relied for its legitimacy upon a set of circumstances that, happily, no longer obtain in earnest.

But in the face of an administration unwilling to pursue legitimate border policy, many see Title 42 as their last hope before the deluge.