Officials familiar with the planning say that the Biden administration is finishing up its response to the end of Title 42 on Wednesday, a border restriction by Trump.
Officials said the plans, which could include bringing back a controversial policy on asylum, could be made public in the next few days. But the administration will have more time to think about its plans. On Monday, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, put a temporary hold on order lifting the policy.
Recently, there has been a surge of migrants at the US-Mexico border. This has worried both Democrats and Republicans, and some have asked the White House to find a way to keep the restrictions in place. It has also brought immigration, a political minefield, back to the forefront. The White House said that the government has to follow a court order.
But Roberts put that order on hold when the leaders of several GOP-led states asked him to. Roberts asked the Biden administration to respond to the appeal by Tuesday at 5 p.m. ET in a short order that showed the court wanted to move quickly.
Roberts’s short order doesn’t necessarily show how the case will end. Still, it does mean that the policy that lets officials quickly send migrants away at US borders will stay in place at least until the justices decide what to do about the emergency application.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement after Roberts’ order that “as required by the Supreme Court’s administrative stay order, the Title 42 public health order will remain in effect at this time, and people who try to enter the United States illegally will continue to be sent back to Mexico.” It also said, “While this stage of the litigation continues, we will continue our preparations to manage the border safely, orderly, and humanely when the time comes.”
The administration has been getting ready for the end of Title 42 for weeks. Title 42 was used at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to turn away migrants at the southern US border. Removing authority means returning to old rules at a time when many people are moving to the Western Hemisphere, putting pressure on already complete resources.
Officials have been thinking about what they can do to stop people from coming to the southern border of the US. One of them is a plan that would make it illegal for migrants to ask for asylum at the US-Mexico border if they could have gotten it in another country they passed through. This is similar to the limits on asylum that Trump put in place. The plan’s final details are being worked out, and it will likely be announced this week before Title 42 is lifted.
Immigration advocates, who have been trying to get rid of Title 42, are likely to protest and sue over the new rules. Putting in place a version of an asylum rule from the Trump administration could also be hard politically for Biden, who has promised to make immigration policy more humane than what Trump did.
The Biden administration tried to end the Title 42 program earlier this year. Still, a group of primarily Republican-led states sued the Department of Homeland Security in a separate case filed in Louisiana and won.
The White House Is Very Worried About Title 42
A White House official said that the delay at the end of Title 42 would not change the preparations that have been going on behind the scenes to get ready for the end of the authority.
Even though the Department of Homeland Security is in charge of the situation and has said that preparations are still going on, the end of the public health authority set up during the pandemic has been a big topic in the West Wing for the last few weeks, with senior White House officials playing a significant role in the internal debates about how to deal with the expected influx of migrants at the border.
The official said there are no plans to slow down the ongoing work since any delay might only be short-term. “We’ve always known that the courts play a role in this process, but that doesn’t change how we do things,” the official said. Officials will also pressure Congress to include more than $3 billion in extra funding in the omnibus funding bill to help them get ready at the border.
The approaching end of Title 42 has significantly caused many worries since the number of migrants trying to cross the border has increased in the days before the order ends. Lawmakers from border states have criticized how Biden has handled the situation. His advisors have met almost every day to talk about their options.
In making their plans, officials have looked for ways to bring order to the situation at the border, where pictures of long lines and overcrowded holding facilities have caused outrage. Their goal has been to stop people from crossing the border illegally while still letting them apply for asylum legally.
It’s still not clear if the new asylum policies will stop people from trying to come to the US. Many people have crossed the border into Mexico, waiting for Title 42 to end. Administration officials have said that many of them are being taken advantage of by smugglers who give them false promises about the end of Title 42. They don’t think that new rules will change these practices.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, economic and safety conditions in the countries the migrants are leaving is still unstable and have gotten worse. The Department of Homeland Security is actively gathering information to determine how many migrants are moving toward the southern border of the US and where they are going. However, human smuggling organizations often change the routes that migrants take. One senior Homeland Security official said, “It’s a cat-and-mouse game.”
The Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis sent a memo last week that showed how worried the administration is about increasing arrivals. The message talked about how human smuggling groups change their methods and how migrants may change their calculations.
The senior DHS official said that on the US side of the border, contracts had been made to move migrants who needed to be processed to other border stations. This is done to avoid overcrowded facilities. The administration has also come up with a list of cities in the United States where migrants could be moved to be processed. This idea has been talked about for a long time, but no decision has been made yet.
DHS broke down its six-pillar plan in a document about border security preparedness. The record came out in the spring and has been updated since then. It includes using more ground and air transportation to get migrants to places where they can be processed and sent away, using a mobile app called CBP One to process asylum seekers, and sending more repeat border crossers to court.
The White House Responds To Criticism
Calls for the administration to find a way to extend the controversial public health authority have been turned down by the White House, which says it has to follow court orders.
Images from the border have worried elected officials, and some have questioned in public how ready and prepared the Biden administration is to handle the expected flood of people trying to enter the United States.
Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, told Biden over the weekend that he should “use every bit of power he has as an executive to find a way or ask for more time.” When asked if Biden has the power to get such an extension, the White House official didn’t say more.
The White House has said that the end of Title 42 does not mean that everyone will be able to cross the US border at once and that there are already ways to handle asylum claims. The administration has also said that the Department of Homeland Security has been working for months to prepare for the increase in migrants coming to the border. It has also asked Congress to give the administration the extra money it has asked for to deal with the situation.
Over the weekend, a federal law enforcement source familiar with daily operations in South Texas told CNN that border patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley have seen between 900 and 1,200 migrants daily for the past two weeks.
Biden And The President Of Ecuador Will Talk About Migration
On Monday, Biden will meet with Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso to discuss migration in the Western Hemisphere. A White House official said that Ecuador has been “setting an important example” on this issue.
The official said that the two leaders would also follow up on several issues discussed at this year’s Summit of the Americas. One of these was an agreement to increase security cooperation to fight gang violence related to drugs.
During the summer, Biden announced a regional partnership to deal with mass migration in the Western Hemisphere. This was done at the same time as the Summit of the Americas. Several countries in the Western Hemisphere signed the agreement, which was called the Los Angeles declaration.
Under the declaration, governments are expected to commit to expanding programs for temporary workers, improving legal pathways like refugee resettlement and family reunification, helping countries with many migrants, and cracking down on networks that traffic people illegally. An official said Biden and Lasso would discuss these efforts again on Monday.
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