Title 42 will be history starting this Friday, but that doesn’t mean major easements for entry into the United States. On the contrary, says the Minister of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. “The border is not open,” he stressed at a White House press conference this Thursday, hours before the end of the immigration measure that allowed for the rapid deportation of irregular immigrants due to Covid.
“The vast majority of those who do not meet the asylum requirements will be expelled” and barred from re-entering the country for five years. They also risk the opening of criminal proceedings against them, the minister stressed.
US authorities remain curious about what might happen if Title 42 ceases to apply at midnight. The Republican opposition predicts more than a million people will try to cross the border in the next three months; The House of Representatives, controlled by that party, introduced a bill Thursday with tough border measures. Local authorities in areas bordering Mexico warn that daily migrant flows into the United States have already increased and are now reaching 10,000 people a day.
Mayorkas himself has acknowledged that the numbers are rising and the processing centers may be overwhelmed: “The pressure on our staff and facilities cannot be overestimated.” Earlier this week, President Joe Biden warned that the situation at the border is still a while away will be “messy”.
As soon as Title 42 expires, a measure from the Donald Trump era in the US presidency, the so-called title will apply again. 8, which was in force until 2020. This measure allows asylum seekers to remain on U.S. soil while their case is being processed, but tightens the cases in which applications are accepted for processing and provides for the almost immediate expulsion of those who are not accepted. . According to Mayorkas, the rejected families will be taken out of the country in less than thirty days.
Border Patrol agents escort arrested migrants to a van in the city of El Paso on May 10. Andres Leighton (AP)
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“In the first half of this fiscal year, we have expelled more than 665,000 people, we operate dozens of deportation flights every week, and their numbers continue to grow,” it said. Just this Wednesday, “we worked with the Mexican government to expel nearly a thousand Venezuelans who failed to use the available legal means of entry.”
As recalled by the US government, in recent months the government has accelerated the establishment of temporary centers to process migrants along the border. It has set up other centers in Colombia and Guatemala to receive asylum applications from migrants from all over the world and launched a mobile application to submit the necessary applications. Monthly quotas of 30,000 visas for nationals of certain countries, funded by a United States resident, have also been established, although the current figure is insufficient to meet needs.
The senior official attributed the current situation to a dysfunctional immigration system that has not undergone significant reform since the 1990s, and all attempts have been blocked by an increasingly divided Congress. “Since then, a lot has changed in terms of migration and the laws also need to change,” Mayorkas said. In addition to the inadequacy of the system, in his opinion, there is also a lack of resources, “less than what we need and have requested”, but which the legislator has not granted them.
Referring to Biden’s description of a “chaotic” situation, Mayorkas noted that his department is experiencing the transition as “challenging.” “A challenge that we will master,” he emphasized. The senior official stressed that his government had been preparing the response to the immigration change for months. Among other things, he recalled that this increased the existing military presence at the border from 1,500 soldiers to 4,000 soldiers to support border protection. “We did everything we could with the resources we had and the limitations of the system we had,” he said.
“We are a country of immigrants and a country of laws. We do our best to enforce these laws in a safe, orderly, and humane manner. We are working with countries in the region to address a regional challenge with regional solutions, and I repeat, we urge Congress to pass much-needed immigration reform,” the Department of Homeland Security chief summed up.
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