Biden uses tool from Trump’s playbook against migrants

Ben Fox, Associated Press

The Biden administration is relying on a contested Trump-era policy as it disperses thousands of Haitian migrants along the US-Mexico border in and around the small South Texas city of Del Rio.

Much to the dismay of migrant advocates, the Department of Homeland Security is invoking the public health law known as Title 42 to quickly take Haitians into custody and fly them back to their troubled homeland, denying them an opportunity to make a claim to stay in the US by seeking asylum.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that most of the Haitians removed from the Del Rio encampment have been expelled under the authority of Title 42, angering human rights activists and others who had hoped to see the policy ended by an administration that has otherwise sought to reverse much of Trump’s immigration agenda.

What is Title 42? The Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act gives federal health officials powers during a pandemic to take extraordinary measures to limit transmission of an infectious disease.

It’s not a new power. The authority has, in various forms, been around since 1893. The Trump administration invoked it in March 2020 to sweeping effect, prohibiting entry by virtually anyone from Mexico and Canada and essentially sealing the northern and southern borders.

It was ostensibly intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in cramped Border Patrol stations or in facilities run by Immigration and Customs and Enforcement. Critics of the policy see it as a thinly disguised measure to thwart immigration, noting it deprives people of the right to claim asylum or seek to remain in the US through some other legal avenue.

Former federal health officials told The Associated Press last year that the Trump administration overruled government scientists who said there was no evidence that invoking Title 42 would slow the coronavirus. Nevertheless, the public health order remains in place and hundreds of thousands of people have been expelled under its authority.

President Joe Biden has been unwinding many Trump policies targeting both legal and illegal immigration. But the new administration has kept Title 42 in place as COVID-19 continues to rage around the world and amid an increase in migrants seeking to enter the US at the southwest border, due in part to the economic upheaval of the pandemic and overall conditions in Central America, Haiti and elsewhere.

The Biden administration halted the Trump-era practice of expelling unaccompanied children into Mexico, and has allowed some migrants travelling with their children to stay in the US to pursue asylum claims or other legal residency. But it has expelled tens of thousands of adults and families under Title 42, insisting it’s a public health measure and not an immigration policy.

The American Civil Liberties Union and others filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to end the expulsions of families. They seemed to score a victory last week, when a federal judge in Washington said the use of Title 42 in this manner was likely illegal. He said he would order the administration to stop expelling families in two weeks. But within hours the administration said it would appeal.

“The Biden administration claims it wants to distance itself from the Trump administration’s inhumane asylum policies,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. “Yet it has retained the most extreme of all the policies, the Title 42 policy that is literally sending families into the hands of persecutors and cartels.”

In recent days, thousands of migrants from Haiti have sought to enter the US at the Del Rio border crossing. Haitians have been trying to get into the country over the Southwest border for years but it’s not clear what prompted so many to gather at this one spot at this particular moment.