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| Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters |
Democrats stripped border control to the bone, hoping to promote their “humane” border policy (which actually creates very inhumane circumstances for migrants). They kept one thing, however: Title 42, which during the height of Covid allowed the government to turn away people trying to cross the border illegally, as a public-health measure. The White House has used the Trump-era order as a crutch for its lack of an immigration policy, hoping to hide behind the Covid-related regulation.
Now, with Title 42 slated for termination in May, administration officials are learning the hard way that even some border control is necessary.
In a Politico and Morning Consult poll, 55 percent of participants said they opposed the Biden administration’s lifting of Title 42 while only 35 percent supported the White House. A whopping 52 percent of independents said they opposed removing Title 42. Biden, who already has cringe-inducing approval ratings, receives especially abysmal marks for immigration. In a recent Ipsos poll for ABC News, Biden had only a 37 percent approval rating on immigration, with a dismal 60 percent disapproval. Immigration was his third worst rating, after inflation and gas prices. Even Democrats — especially those up for reelection in the fall — are calling on the president to reconsider lifting Title 42 until there’s a plan in place to control surging migrant encounters.
American’s disapproval of the president is rooted in a disturbing reality: The border is in crisis, and that crisis is about to get much worse. As I wrote last week:
With the lifting of Title 42, the Biden administration will probably be overrun by migrants at the border. It’s already bad; the DHS is currently reporting an average of 7,100 daily encounters, up from 5,900 in February, and is bracing for a “mass migration event” of up to 170,000 encounters in the days and weeks after May 23. Axios reported that, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the worst-case scenario would be 12,000 to 18,000 encounters a day.
Already, due to Biden’s open-door messaging, the border is encountering record numbers of asylum-seekers, overwhelming and derailing Border Patrol operations. Jim Volscko, a former Customs and Border Protection officer, told me that Border Patrol is not understaffed, it’s “overtasked.” “They’re no longer doing their job,” he told me. “All they are [doing] is transporting the ‘give-ups’ and processing to release.” One Texas trooper told me “they got [Border Patrol officers] changing diapers.”
With an average of 7,100 encounters a day, Border Patrol officers are spending all their time processing asylum claims, leaving the rest of the border especially porous to the delight of smugglers and cartels. During my trip to the souther border last week, one Texas Department of Public Safety officer told me that these are the “bad people,” coming in: “They would have turned themselves in at a port of entry.” These are “people that don’t want to get caught,” he told me.
When Title 42 is lifted, opening the door for even more asylum claims, the crisis will only get worse.
Indeed, everyone I spoke to at the border — from law-enforcement officers, to landowners, to private citizens — had one word to describe a post–Title 42 border: disaster.
One Border Patrol agent, who was loading up a group of asylum seekers to be processed, laughed when I asked if the Biden administration had a plan to deal with the impending crisis: “Not that they’ve told us,” he said. --->READ MORE HERE
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