One of the few remaining provisions that is controlling the U.S. southern border in any meaningful way is about to be terminated by Team Biden.
Title 42 is a little-known public health provision invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020 which allowed the U.S. to promptly remove migrants caught crossing the border illegally to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
In February, 55 percent of the 164,973 migrants apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were removed under Title 42.
A new deluge of illegals is expected to pour across the border once Title 42 is eliminated next month. That is a deluge on top of the hundreds of thousands of illegals already entering the U.S. on a monthly basis.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence estimates that some 25,000 migrants are already waiting in Mexican shelters just south of the border for Title 42 to end.
"Internal discussions have raised alarms that human trafficking networks throughout Mexico and Central America will exploit the situation to 'generate a mass migration event,' " Axios reported on March 17.
Assuming that Title 42 is lifted next month, border agents could be dealing with some 340,000 migrants at the border in April. And that is assuming that the usual migrant flow does not get worse.
Detention space for illegals is already limited. If the expected surge materializes when Title 42 is eliminated CBP will either have to quickly remove those illegals or release most of them. The latter is the most likely scenario.
The situation at the border has become so dire that DHS is asking for volunteers from across various agencies, including ICE, TSA, USCIS, and medical personnel from HHS, to assist CBP’s border staff.
Team Biden has also taken aim at what may be the only remaining border provision at is working. In 2019, President Doanld Trump implemented the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP, better known as “Remain in Mexico”).
MPP allowed CBP to return illegal migrants back across the border to await their removal hearings, effectively preventing them from living and working in the United States indefinitely while they were applying for asylum.
"MPP worked, and illegal entries plummeted," the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) noted. "Despite this success, Biden’s DHS has attempted to scrap Remain in Mexico, but the courts stepped in and prevented it from doing so."
The Supreme Court will hear the administration’s challenge to that order on April 26.
In the interim, Joe Biden "has begrudgingly made a half-hearted attempt to comply with the court’s order," the CIS report noted.
"The political fall-out of two to three million illegal migrants at the Southwest border may, though, prompt Biden to rethink his objections to MPP. It’s much cheaper than detention in the United States, and as DHS found in its October 2019 assessment of the program, MPP both discourages illegal migration and speeds along asylum cases while deterring weak and fraudulent protection claims."
About . . . . Intelligence . . . . Membership
