Tag Archive for: EndingTitle42

‘Shocking Discovery:’ Biden Knows Drug Cartels Control, Profit From Illegal Immigration, DHS Memo Shows

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Border patrol agents are preparing for “a possible increase in migrant activity due to an increase in large group activity” as a result of Biden administration immigration policies, an internal Department of Homeland Security document released by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody says.

It specifically sites suspending the Migrant Protection Protocols, otherwise known as the Remain in Mexico Policy, and terminating the public health authority, Title 42, as contributing to an influx of people coming to the U.S. southern border from Central and South America through Mexico.

“This is a shocking discovery,” Moody said. “It contradicts what the Biden administration has been telling the American people and shows that the Mexican drug cartels are profiting off the mass migration of unvetted immigrants to fund an increase in violence at the border.”

Attorneys general from multiple states has sued the administration over terminating both policies, including Texas AG Ken Paxton and Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, who recently argued before the Supreme Court asking it to require the administration to follow the law and reinstate the MPP.

“We are in the midst of a national opioid crisis and the deadliest drugs are being smuggled into our country from Mexico,” Moody said in a statement. “President Biden knows this, yet he continues to double down on his terrible immigration policies knowing full well these policies are emboldening and enriching the very drug cartels who are profiting off the deaths of thousands of Americans.”

Entitled “U.S. Customs and Border Protection Overview of the Southwest Border,” the 8-page redacted document describes the role of Mexican cartels and transnational, organized-criminal networks in smuggling people to the U.S.

It states, “…we assess that smuggling networks are very active in promoting the flow of migrants through Mexico as drug trafficking organizations maintain control of the primary trafficking corridors into the United States. The drug trafficking organizations’ control of these corridors allows them to regulate the flow of migrants as well as charge migrants a ‘tax’ … for the right to pass through the corridors.

“Transnational criminal organizations will exploit migration flows and entrench themselves in the smuggling cycle. TCOs endanger vulnerable individuals, amass illicit profits that feed cartel violence in Mexico and along the border, and create a volatile border environment.”

The document also “proves that the Biden administration knows that its disastrous border policies are responsible for the influx of illegal migrants,” Moody says. She points to a section that states that “irregular migration,” which is new terminology DHS is using to refer to illegal immigration, “will likely increase in the fiscal year 2021 as economic opportunities emerge and migrant perceptions of U.S. immigration policies shift.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and DHS officials are preparing for an influx of people, having “initiated contingency planning in anticipation of a potential surge of illegal migration,” the document states, with preparation to move them into the U.S.

It points to Biden administration policies, including, “the pause in the use of removal pathways such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, Asylum Cooperation Agreements, and Prompt Asylum Claim Review,” as factors contributing to increased migration, which have restricted CBP and Border Patrol agents’ ability over the last year to process and remove those in the U.S. illegally.

Total CBP encounters with illegal immigrants at the southwest border totaled nearly 2.5 million since February 2021, Moody notes, with deportations down by 70% last year.

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This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

Lifting Title 42 Will Mean Fewer Border Patrol Agents in Field

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Border security experts expect the nation will bear the consequences of more illegal immigration whether the Biden administration ends a key public health measure by the end of the month or does it later.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last month that the policy, known as Title 42, would expire May 23. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has estimated that could mean an influx of 18,000 migrants a day who cross the border illegally.

“There are too many Democrats pushing back, too many Democrats terrified of the consequences, because the [Department of Homeland Security] itself, Biden’s DHS, was predicting a doubling or more of the flow across the border if they lifted Title 42,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Signal in a recent interview.

“But it is going to be lifted at some point,” Krikorian said of Title 42.

Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., are among the most vocal Democrats calling for the Biden administration to keep the public health policy in place.

Title 42 is a provision of a 1944 law meant to stop the spread of communicable diseases. The provision allowed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take emergency action in March 2020, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, to authorize border authorities to quickly expel illegal immigrants and deny entry to asylum-seekers.

Although the measure hasn’t stopped huge numbers of illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border and immediately claiming asylum, it has made it easier for the Border Patrol to send back illegal aliens.

‘Enormous Pressure From Left’

Once Title 42 is gone, unlawful border crossers will have the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated on American soil.

“Unless Congress intervenes and passes a law saying they can keep it in place and the president signs it, it just seems to me it’s going to have to be lifted at some point because the president is also getting enormous pressure from this hard left,” Krikorian told The Daily Signal.

“When they do that,” he added, “it’s going to be bad news on the border and it’s going to be worse news for the Democratic Party, because the more they keep delaying it, the closer and closer it gets to the election.”

The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates strict enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants, organized a visit to the border in South Texas last month that The Daily Signal joined.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met Tuesday in Washington with Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.

Mayorkas “spoke of the United States’ whole-of-government strategy to prepare for the CDC’s announced May 23, 2022, end to the exercise of its Title 42 authority,” according to the department’s readout of the meeting.

Expulsions Under Title 42

After the CDC invoked Title 42, the Border Patrol had about 2.9 million encounters with illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border between April 2020 and March 2022, according to a study by Pew Research. March is the most recent month for which such data is available.

About 1.8 million of those encounters, or 61%, resulted in illegal immigrants being expelled under Title 42, according to Pew. The 1.1 million remaining encounters ended with illegal immigrants being detained, at least temporarily, rather than sent back.

Expulsions were based largely on whether the migrants came as families and whether children were involved.

Under the Biden administration, about 88% of the 1.8 million expulsions since 2020 under Title 42 were of single adults, while 11% were families and 1% were unaccompanied minors.

About 60% of those expelled came from Mexico, 15% came from Guatemala, 14% from Honduras, 5% from El Salvador, and 6% from other countries, according to Pew.

COVID-19 isn’t the only public health concern to consider, said Chris Cabrera, spokesman for the union National Border Patrol Council Local 3307, which represents nonsupervisory Border Patrol employees who work in the Rio Grande Valley.

“It’s to the point where everybody I work with, every single person, has had COVID,” Cabrera told a group gathered in Texas for the border tour sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies.

But, the union spokesman said, some Border Patrol agents have contracted communicable diseases while policing the border that doctors have had trouble diagnosing.

‘Spinning Your Wheels’

If Title 42 ends, it will bring more chaos to the southern border, said Michael Salinas, a retired Border Patrol agent who was on the front lines for 34 years.

“Pretty much, there’s going to be nobody out in the field,” Salinas told The Daily Signal.

“The Border Patrol knows where they’re at,” the veteran agent said of these so-called got-aways. “But if they don’t have access to it because they’re stuck processing or prepping people for transport to processing centers, it takes away from all that. So you’re just spinning your wheels.”

The Center for Immigration Studies’ Krikorian said he expects that Biden and congressional Democrats will try to kick the can down the road, but that it can’t go on forever.

Events may depend on what faction in the Biden administration prevails, he said:

There are two factions in the administration on this immigration issue. They both believe the same thing. In other words, everybody in the administration wants basically amnesty for all the illegals and unlimited immigration in the future, and all that stuff. It’s not really at all a policy dispute, it’s a political dispute.

Krikorian said White House chief of staff Ron Klain and Susan Rice, director of the Domestic Policy Council, are trying to take a more politically acceptable approach to illegal immigration in the short term.

“The people like Ron Klain and Susan Rice, who are at least a little bit more in touch with reality … the point is they’re more cautious politically,” Krikorian said. “But then everybody who’s in charge of immigration policy are radicals. They’re anti-borders radicals.”

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Tidal Wave Nears Border, but Team Biden Goes Full Steam Ahead

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Editors’ Note: The following article is an excellent description of the southern border crisis, an open border threatening all citizens and the national security of the United States. The statement is often made that the Biden administration doesn’t have an effective policy to address this crisis. Our national headlines should be shouting that this crisis and invasion of our country is exactly the administration’s policy. With large numbers of Hispanic American citizens leaving the Democrat party, the radical leftists running the executive branch want many millions of non-skilled, unvetted illegal residents flooding into the country who will be highly dependent on government services and ultimately Democrat voters, whether legal or not, in the decades to come. Damn the fentanyl, the criminals, the terrorists, the cartels or any other factor undermining our national security and sovereignty – just flood the nation (yes, all fifty states) with illegals and the hell with American citizens – whatever it takes to maintain Democrat power is the goal. The previous America First policy controlling and protecting our southern border is now the Americans Last policy of the Biden presidency.

 

A disaster is looming.

President Joe Biden appears to be going full steam ahead on ending Title 42. This is the health policy, created in the 1940s and implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Donald Trump, that allowed the swift deportation of illegal immigrants during the pandemic to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.

It has been one of the few things keeping the exploding southern border numbers under even the slightest control during the Biden presidency. The administration announced it would end Title 42 on May 23, but according to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, it is starting to peel it away even sooner.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently released its March statistics for illegal immigrant border encounters. It’s a sign of what’s to come.

In total, there were 221,303 encounters along the southwest land border in March, a 33 percent increase compared to February,” the agency reported. “Of those, 28 percent involved individuals who had at least one prior encounter in the previous 12 months, compared to an average one-year re-encounter rate of 14 percent for FY2014-2019.”

Of course, many others came through without being apprehended.

The March numbers are the highest monthly total in two decades. And this is before Title 42 is set to be discontinued.

It’s not just raw numbers of illegal border crossers that are worrying. According to the agency, over 40 migrants on the terror watchlist have been apprehended since Biden became president. These are people who have been known to be involved in or are “reasonably suspected” of being involved in terrorist activity.

The U.S. Border Patrol is already swamped. In March, Customs and Border Protection estimated that, in addition to the over 221,000 encounters, over 60,000 border crossers slipped through without being apprehended—about 2,000 per day. Drastically increasing the total numbers of those attempting to cross the border—which will inevitably happen if Title 42 is rescinded—puts the country at risk that more potential terrorists will slip through.

When Biden was considering ending Title 42, a handful of border state Democrats warned him against it. But now that he’s made the announcement, the list of Democrats in opposition is growing. One of the opponents is Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.

Several Republicans on the committee wrote him a letter in early April expressing deep concern about what ending Title 42 would mean for the country. Peters seemed to have been receptive to the message.

“Unless we have a well-thought-out plan, I think it is something that should be revisited and perhaps delayed,” Peters said to reporters, according to The Hill. “I’m going to defer judgment on that until I give the administration the opportunity to fully articulate what that plan is. But I share … concerns of some of my colleagues.”

The entire situation conveys the impression that the Biden administration is reckless and partisan and that it caters to the most extreme voices on its left flank. It’s part of the toothless Caesarism that we’ve become used to over the past year. The administration does its best to create vast restrictions on Americans at home, but does nothing to protect the American people or our interests from threats abroad.

If the administration really does think it is necessary to end Title 42, it could at least show some commitment to options that would help maintain order at the border. Biden has even failed to do that.

Predictably, the administration has chosen to do everything to remove those options, too.

The Biden administration has done everything in its power—or beyond its power—to eliminate the Migrant Protection Protocols—better known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The policy, like Title 42, was created under Trump and was designed as an answer to President Barack Obama’s “catch and release” border policy.

The Remain in Mexico policy makes it so asylum-seekers—those claiming to flee war zones, political violence, or persecution—must wait in Mexico while applying for asylum in the U.S. It deters people who may want to come to the United States with bogus asylum claims. Once in the country, many dodge their court dates or never get a court date at all.

Biden ended the Remain in Mexico policy on Day One of his presidency and is now engaged in a legal battle to put the policy entirely off the table.

So, what’s the administration’s plan if it gets its way? The Wall Street Journal editorial board did a good job of explaining what’s on tap:

The administration’s alternative seems to be a new policy that would let federal asylum officers grant residence to most claimants, rather than wait in the queue for Justice Department immigration judges. The asylum officers approve claims at a higher rate than judges, who weigh more seriously whether a claimant is fleeing genuine danger. That message will spread throughout Latin America as further incentive to make the trek and cross the border seeking asylum.

Battling the Remain in Mexico Policy, combined with ending Title 42 and the general lack of support for Border Patrol, suggests that the administration isn’t willing to uphold American law and protect our border.

Instead, it is doing everything in its power to not only keep those floodgates open but to open them even wider, forcing the American people to pay the price for its recklessness.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Republican-led States Sue Biden Administration Over Repeal of Title 42 Border Rule

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Three Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration in an attempt to prevent it from lifting a rule that allows illegal immigrants at the border to be expelled in the name of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Former President Donald Trump instituted that policy, Title 42, but the Biden administration announced Friday that it would end it. The lawsuit, filed by Louisiana, Missouri, and Arizona, alleges that removing the order is “profoundly illegal.”

“The Title 42 Revocation thus stands as a radical outlier – seemingly the only COVID-19-based restriction the Administration sees fit to end,” the lawsuit reads. “But the CDC’s Termination Order is not merely unfathomably bad public policy. It is also profoundly illegal. That is principally so for two reasons: (1) Defendants unlawfully flouted the notice-and-comment requirements for rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and (2) Defendants’ Termination Order is arbitrary and capricious, thus violating the APA, because it has numerous omissions that each independently render it illegal.”

The Biden administration has made several regulatory changes to loosen immigration enforcement.

Since President Joe Biden took office, illegal immigration has soared. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that federal agents encountered about 2 million illegal immigrants trying to enter the country last year. That does not include those migrants who slipped by undetected.

Republicans have pointed to that rise as another reason to strengthen, not weaken, border enforcement.

“President Biden’s open-border policies are an unmitigated disaster for national security,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement. “His recklessness has forced the State of Texas to take unprecedented steps to fill the gaps – including deploying Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and over 10,000 Texas National Guard soldiers, jailing illegal immigrants who are charged with trespassing, and becoming the first state ever to build a wall to secure the border.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the change Friday, calling the rule “no longer necessary.”

“After considering current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19 (such as highly effective vaccines and therapeutics), the CDC Director has determined that an Order suspending the right to introduce migrants into the United States is no longer necessary,” the agency said in a statement. “With CDC’s assistance and guidance, DHS has and will implement additional COVID-19 mitigation procedures. These measures, along with the current public health landscape where 97.1% of the U.S. population lives in a county identified as having “low” COVID-19 Community Level, will sufficiently mitigate the COVID-19 risk for U.S. communities.”

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This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.