Top State Department adviser quits

Lawyer rebukes use of Title 42 to deport migrants.

A top lawyer at the State Department left his job Friday and excoriated President Joe Biden’s deportations of migrants at the southern border, calling the policy “inhumane” and “illegal.”

The rebuke by Harold Koh, the top political appointee in the Office of the Legal Adviser, is the latest example of passionate dissent within the Biden administration on immigration issues following the resignation of Biden’s special envoy for Haiti last month.

In an internal memo to colleagues, Koh takes aim at the Biden administration’s use of the public health authority known as Title 42, which has been invoked to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants since Biden came into office, saying it is unworthy of an administration “I so strongly support.”

“I believe this administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return . . . individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” he wrote in the memo, which was first reported by Politico.

President Donald Trump first invoked Title 42, a rarely used public health authority, to expel immigrants at the U.s.-mexico border. Liberals decried the move as the exploitation of the global pandemic to impose hardline immigration policies. Biden has continued the policy to the chagrin of immigration advocates and invoked it most recently to deport thousands of Haitian asylum seekers in Texas back to the impoverished Caribbean country.

In the memo, Koh said the scale of the Biden administration’s use of the authority is “startling.”

“Nearly 700,000 people have been expelled under Title 42 since February of this year, and ... this past August alone, 91,147 were forcibly removed,” he said, citing Customs and Border Patrol statistics.

When asked about the letter, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the continuation of the policy, saying “it remains in place because we are in the middle of a pandemic.”

In rejecting Koh’s claim that the policy is “inhumane,” Psaki said “there are several exceptions for Title 42, including those who are fleeing persecution who express a concern of fear.”

Critics have said such exceptions should apply more easily to Haitians whom the Biden administration has deported back to a country overwhelmed with an array of crises including the proliferation of powerful armed gangs, food insecurity, the spread of the coronavirus and the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in August.

In September, Biden’s special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, quit after six months on the job, saying he couldn’t be “associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti.”

Koh had been an internal critic of the Biden administration’s deportation policy for months, but the 3,000word memo amounted to his lengthiest criticism of the policy, according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.