Fear of an influx of migrants at the US-Mexico border. Before lifting a health measure that had blocked access to the country since the pandemic began, the United States dispatched more than 24,000 agents on Wednesday and enacted new restrictions on the right to asylum. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged that “the coming days and weeks” could be “very difficult”. He said authorities had already “detected high numbers of arrivals in some areas”.
The day before, Democratic President Joe Biden even admitted that the situation would be “chaotic” when the so-called “Title 42” device expired at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday. This regulation, intended to limit the spread of Covid-19, gave the American authorities the opportunity to immediately reject all migrants entering the country, including asylum seekers. In three years it was used 2.8 million times.
Almost 24,000 additional agents
As the abolition approached, many exiles, mainly from Latin America but also from China, Russia and Turkey, began to arrive in border towns such as Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso. In El Paso, hundreds of people sleep on the streets. Mayor Oscar Leeser expects a wave of “12,000 to 15,000 people” by the end of the week.
To support local authorities, the government on Wednesday announced the deployment of “more than 24,000 agents and police officers and more than 1,100 coordinators” from the border police. This does not include the 1,500 soldiers sent by the Ministry of Defense to reinforce the 2,500 soldiers already on the ground.
New restrictions
At the same time, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have passed new restrictions on the right to asylum. Announced in February, they have been the subject of a mandatory consultation process and will come into force on Thursday evening. Asylum seekers, with the exception of unaccompanied minors, must now have made an appointment before the border crossing point following a telephone request from border guards or have been denied access to asylum in one of the countries transited on their migration journey. Otherwise, their application will be deemed illegal and they will face an accelerated deportation process that will ban them from entering American soil for five years.
The United States plans to expand repatriation flights, which will double or triple for certain destinations. To ensure that migrants do not disappear into the country while waiting for their files to be checked, around 7,000 additional places in detention centers will be created. To encourage legal immigration channels, Washington has planned to eventually open a hundred “regional administrative centers” outside the country, where the files of emigrant candidates will be examined. The first are planned in Colombia and Guatemala.