The Biden administration recently announced that it will cancel Title 42 as of May 23, based on an assessment by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that COVID-19 no longer poses a critical public health threat to the American public. Title 42 was invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020, allowing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to quickly return migrants apprehended after illegally crossing the southern border to Mexico, to check the spread of the virus in the United States.
“President Biden last week introduced his administration’s major immigration bill, after issuing an executive order on Feb. 2 to address the root causes of migration from Central America to the United States and, during his campaign, pledging to spend at least $4 billion to reduce “endemic corruption, violence and poverty” in the region.”
President Biden has taken the position that Central American and other migrants attempting to enter the United States across our southern border are legitimate asylum seekers who are fleeing for their lives. The president has been harshly critical of his predecessor, who took the view that most of those attempting to reach the United States are economic migrants seeking better opportunities, rather than escaping persecution. President Biden has labeled former President Trump’s policies that barred many migrants from entering the U.S. as “cruel” or “inhumane.”
A 2,200-word memo from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, released March 16, attempts to convince the front-line defenders of our nation’s borders, along with the American people, that the crisis thrust upon us by the Biden administration isn’t really a crisis at all but merely a “difficult” situation.