Pressure builds on Biden to cancel coronavirus border shutdown for illegal immigrants

Top Democrats and hundreds of immigrant-rights advocacy groups demanded Thursday that President Biden cancel the pandemic border shutdown policy that’s blocked hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from attempting to gain a foothold in the U.S.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Robert Menendez held a press conference call to ask Mr. Biden to rescind the policy, and some 300 activist groups fired off a letter to the president calling for action.

The groups said the policy, one of the few get-tough measures the Biden team kept in place from the Trump administration, has always been dangerous — and, they argue, illegal.

Now, with the pandemic easing, the groups have renewed calls for Mr. Biden to fully end the shutdown policy, known officially as Title 42.

“The Title 42 policy is a stain on the conscience of the United States,” the groups said. “The continued use of the Title 42 policy indelibly marks your administration as complicit in human rights abuses on a massive scale.”

Mr. Schumer, for his part, said he was “disappointed” Title 42 is still being used, saying it “goes against everything this country stands for.”

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus also issued a statement late Thursday demanding an end to Title 42 and chastising Mr. Biden for having held on to a “xenophobic” policy from the Trump administration for so long.

“Using the pandemic as an excuse to keep implementing the Trump Title 42 policy — that has prevented millions of asylum seekers from refuge — must end,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz, California Democrat and chair of the Hispanic Caucus.

Under Title 42, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ruled that illegal immigrants present a serious danger of introducing new cases of the coronavirus. With that ruling, Homeland Security is authorized to immediately return unauthorized border crossers back across the boundary — or to their home country.

Over the last two years, more than a million expulsions have been done under Title 42.

In January alone, out of nearly 147,000 Border Patrol encounters with illegal immigrants, more than 76,000 were expelled under Title 42.

The 71,000 who weren’t expelled are mostly comprised of unaccompanied juveniles or parents and children traveling together. Most of those were caught and released into the U.S. with the hope that they will show up for their immigration court proceedings and deportation down the road.

Border security advocates say more people should be subject to Title 42. They connect the ongoing record border surge to the large number of migrants being caught and released.

Immigrant-rights advocates, meanwhile, say people with legitimate asylum claims are being snared by Title 42, sending them back to dangerous conditions.

In the letter Thursday, activists said they’ve tallied 8,705 reports of kidnapping, rape, trafficking, torture and other attacks on people who were subject to Title 42.

The Biden administration says Title 42 is about health, not immigration. But that argument is becoming tougher to defend.

Not only are virus cases in the U.S. dropping, with the CDC easing recommendations, but cases in key migrant-sending countries like Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala are also coming down.

A federal appeals court last week, while supporting the administration’s powers under Title 42, took a shot at why it’s still in effect.

“The CDC’s … order looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics, and little certainty,” wrote Judge Justin R. Walker.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said it’s up to the CDC to decide when it’s time to end Title 42 expulsions.

“We are not yet in a position where we have put the pandemic entirely behind us,” he said during a visit to the border in San Diego late last year.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.