US President Joe Biden announced Thursday that undocumented migrants attempting to cross the border will be deported immediately. The proclamation comes as the Trump-era policy Title 42 is set to be rescinded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in May.
Title 42 enables the border patrol to immediately remove migrants from the country without allowing them to apply for refugee status. During the 2020 campaign, Biden called the policy “inhumane.”
Yet the coming end of Title 42 has Republicans and some Democrats fearful about a possible wave of undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the southern border. Title 42 was put in place by former US President Donald Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ostensibly designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 through immigration, it has become a policy whose only function can be to limit refugees, as the United States already has the most COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world.
“To be clear, people who cross the border without legal authorization will be placed immediately in deportation procedures,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said. “And, if they cannot certify their stay in the United States, they will be returned quickly to their countries.”
More than 1.6 million migrants have been deported under the Trump and Biden administrations, according to The Daily Mail. However, children under the age of 18 became exempt from Title 42 under Biden.
Migrant advocacy groups have been urging the Biden administration to end Title 42, referring to the practice, as Biden did, as inhumane. Biden has had to juggle his campaign promises with push back from members of his own party.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has urged Biden to keep Title 42 in place, as Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) tweeted she is concerned that the administration does not have a plan to deal with a potential surge in immigrants.
During the campaign, then-candidate Biden promised to increase the number of refugees into the country from Trump’s historically low 15,000 to 123,000. However, he revised that number to a more modest 62,500 for fiscal year 2021 once in office. According to CNBC, the administration ended up only allowing in 11,411 refugees during that time, the lowest since the Refugee Act passed in 1980. Biden did increase the number to 125,000 for fiscal 2022, with 15,000 for Latin America and the Caribbean.
It is unclear how or if the 100,000 refugees from Ukraine that the United States plans to let in will affect that number. Approximately 10,000 spots were designated for Europe and Central Asia, with another 10,000 set aside to increase each region’s cap if needed, but the White House said it would not require an increase to the 125,000 figure because they “don't currently envision the need to go beyond that.”
Many of the migrants arriving at the southern border come from the “Golden Triangle” of Latin American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. It is worth acknowledging the United States’ role in those countries and how its backing of regime change contributed to the refugee crisis in present day.
In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup d’etat to overthrow the first democratically-elected leader of Guatemala, with US support of the Guatemalan government continuing well into the 1980s.
Former US President Ronald Reagan poured billions of dollars to prop up a right-wing government in El Salvador that utilized death squads and killed over 75,000 Salvadorans, most of them civilians.
In 2009, segments of the US government supported a coup d’etat in Honduras, despite public claims of neutrality by the Obama administration, according to an investigation by The Intercept.
It could be argued that these three countries still have not recovered from coups orchestrated or supported by the US government.
In February 2021, the Biden administration signed an executive order, called the Root Causes Initiative, earmarking $4 billion in aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras over the next four years. According to Marisa Limón Garza, deputy director of Hope Border Institute, an organization that is a part of the Root Causes Initiative, there is still a long way to go before immigration will be properly addressed in this way.
“The question becomes: How do we move beyond deterrence tactics that are outdated and don’t really work,” Limón Garza told Devex. “And how do we think about more humanitarian, thoughtful approaches while also addressing those drivers of migration?”