Border policy amidst pandemic
When Joe Biden was campaigning for the presidency, his plan for securing our values as a nation of immigrants included a promise to reverse Trump's immigration enforcement and border security measures. To a great extent, he has kept that promise.
He also promised to "follow the science" in fighting COVID19.Politicians should keep their campaign promises.
Biden should have waited until the deadly COVID-19 pandemic was over before reversing Trump's border security measures - or at the very least implemented scientific protocols at the border not only to prevent the spread of the virus among migrants who cross the border illegally, but also to prevent them from bringing the virus - including potentially dangerous variants - into the interior of the US
Last March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) determined that admitting certain aliens from Canada and
Mexico created a serious danger of bringing COVID-19 into the United States, regardless of their country of origin. Accordingly, it issued an order temporarily prohibiting the admission of such aliens pursuant to its authority under sections 362 and 365 of the Public Health Service Act (pages 378 and 381).
The order permitted the rapid expulsion of aliens who would otherwise be held in crowded areas while being processed at a Port of Entry or a Border Patrol station.
These areas were not designed to isolate or permit social distancing of persons who are or may be infected with a highly transmissible disease.
Typically, this applied to aliens seeking admission without proper documents and aliens apprehended after making an illegal crossing at a land border.On Feb. 17, Biden announced an exception for unac- companied alien children.
The Border Patrol apprehends thousands of unaccompanied alien children every month at the border with Mexico: 5,688 in January; 9,269 in February; 18,724 in March; 16,910 in April; and 13,906 in May. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) statistics indicate that about 75 percent of the children are between the ages of 15 and 17, but more than 100 unaccompanied children each month this year were under six years of age.
Trump also established the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) program, which has been referred to as the "Remain in Mexico" policy. It required certain aliens entering or seeking admission to the United States from Mexico - illegally or without proper documentation - to return to Mexico and wait there for the duration of their immigration proceedings.
Trump claimed that this provided a safer and more orderly immigration process which discouraged individuals from taking advantage of our immigration system by making a false persecution claim just to be able to enter and remain in the United States.
Biden paused that program shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, allowing around 11,000 of the aliens in the program to enter the United States before ending the program entirely on June 1.
It is too soon to determine how many of the 68,000 people who were returned to Mexico pursuant to this program will be entering the
United States to wait here for the duration of their immigration proceedings. No one knows how many new asylum seekers will come now that the program has been ended.
In any case, ending the MPP program almost certainly will cause a surge in asylum cases for our immigration courts, which already are struggling unsuccessfully with a 1,322,938-case backlog. The average wait for a hearing is 934 days. Surge at the border
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claims that the "open-border policies" of the Biden administration have caused a surge in illegal border crossings. The numbers support Abbott.
Encounters at the southwest border averaged around 70,000 a month in the four months before Biden took office, and then rose to 97,640 in February, his first full month in office; to 169,204 in March; to 173,686 in April; and were 172,011 in May.
Almost all of them originate from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala - and the COVID-19 vaccination rate in those countries has been very low.