Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security have been planning to tell Mexico that the Covid-inspired Title 42 policy that allows border agents to expel migrants and asylum-seekers without a court hearing may expire as soon as April, driving an influx of migrants and straining resources.
DHS officials warned that without the special public health measure, the agency will need to go back to old protocol to process illegal immigrants, who could apply for asylum and argue their case to remain in the U.S., according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The return to those standard practices could “seriously strain” border resources and create a migrant surge, the draft document noted. Department officials seemed to recognize the unprecedented number of border crossers this year, which they called “historically and unseasonably high.”
DHS officials are also monitoring the Haitians who have received temporary protected status in Mexico who could later decide to come to the U.S. September saw a Haitian-migrant crisis in which thousands of border-crossers converged on the Del Rio bridge in Texas, setting up encampments and overwhelming agents and detention centers. Title 42 was used to turn away thousands of Haitians, although thousands of others were able to gain entry into the interior. As of September, migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border were at a 21-year high.
The Biden administration has confronted multiple legal challenges to Title 42, from the ACLU and other groups, which was imposed under the Trump administration at the height of Covid-19 and has been renewed by the CDC a few times. In April 2021, the Biden administration was considering creating a formal system that would allow exceptions to be made for certain vulnerable asylum-seekers from the public health measure, BuzzFeed reported at the time.
While the Biden DHS has promised a humanitarian approach to immigration, scrapping many of the policies of its predecessor, it kept Title 42 to help it manage the situation at the border, which had been spiraling out of control for many months with record apprehensions. Nearly 1.7 million arrests were made at the southern border in fiscal year 2021, and hundreds of thousands of those were released into the U.S.
A DHS spokesperson told Buzzfeed in a statement that unless significant changes are made to Title 42, the agency “will continue to expel single adults and families encountered at the Southwest border, where appropriate.”
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling allowing the government to continue invoking Title 42.