Ukrainians at the US border pose a challenge to Title 42
The jig is up.
The Biden administration no longer has the cover of the sins of the Trump administration. Not with immigration and the growing number of people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Ukrainians are now joining Haitians, Mexicans and Central Americans already there, all hoping to do what is legally allowed: seek asylum.
Biden’s team within the Department of Homeland Security has about a month and a half to perform a Herculean act. It must put in place adequate staff to process fairly thousands of people through their first step, the interview phase.
On Friday, April 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made good on an anticipated rescinding of a Trump-era policy that essentially allowed both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump to circumvent asylum law. Trump started it, Biden kept it going. Both shoved asylum seekers back into Mexico and further away nations. These migrants had been expelled because of the supposed risk they posed in spreading COVID-19, a flimsy and widely debunked rationale.
It’s called Title 42 and ends May 23.
Biden officials are claiming they plan to shorten what had been a four-year process for migrants to gain asylum status to just 90 days. It’s a suspiciously aggressive overhaul.
It won’t be an easy task and the fact that more Ukrainians are arriving daily will only further complicate things. Most of the Ukrainians will likely fit the narrow parameters of refugee and asylum law. They’ll be able to easily support their well-founded fear of persecution should they return home.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has all but ensured their legal passage with his heinous and genocidal attacks on their nation. Most of Ukrainian refugees have flown to Mexico from eastern Europe and are now presenting themselves to immigration agents at the border. Many have family and contacts in the U.S., another factor that should help expedite their resettlement.
The Ukrainians also have the empathy of the world, as they should by virtue of their dire circumstances.
But others, mostly Black and brown people, often do not. Their plight is not war, but it’s war-like. Every day they face the violence of drug lords, as well as extreme poverty and political turmoil.
How the Biden administration addresses this fact is critical. As reporters and human rights organizations have documented, Title 42 has cast migrants into horrifically dangerous situations.
Human desperation is universal and it’s difficult, if not foolhardy, to weigh one migrant’s needs over another. Unfortunately, long-held and internationally recognized rules around asylum do exactly that. But it would be discriminatory if the largely white Ukrainians are ushered in, while others are thrust back into dangerous conditions in either Mexico or further away.
We’ve already failed in very public ways with Haitians. Remember the September 2021 photos of the U.S. border agents on horseback chasing down Haitians who were running away? It looked like a scene from the Confederate South; reminiscent of white plantation owners cruelly hunting people like human chattel.
The Haitians were simply trying to return to a camp where other migrants were waiting to attempt the asylum process. They also wanted to bring back food they’d purchased in Mexico.
Again, the excuse that this was Trump’s doing will soon be no more.
In March 2020, Trump used the pandemic to see through the desires of his heart. He made no secret that he wanted to severely limit immigration. Slashing the number of refugees was one of his methods.
Trump seemed to resent that many Haitians and people from Central America were attempting to migrate legally.
Under a crafty usage of a public health law, the Trump administration began denying anyone who sought asylum the opportunity to even try. The rationale was to keep the nation safe from the spread of COVID. The policy became known as Title 42, named after the legal code from which it stems.
Scientists soon offered counter views, noting that the virus was already circulating inside the U.S. and that testing and other measures could be used to ensure safety as migrant asylum claims were processed.
Until now, the lingering of COVID-19 gave the Biden administration a lame excuse to mimic the Trump administration’s policy.
Eventually, Title 42 was used 1.7 million times to repatriate migrants. Again, the CDC has terminated the policy, effective May 23.
To be clear, the Biden administration could have stopped enforcing it months earlier. But it was too convenient, politically and logistically.
Now a count down of sorts has started. The time was ripe to repeal Title 42, but also the dehumanizing unfairness it exemplifies.
Ukrainian refugees have the empathy of the world, as they should by virtue of their dire circumstances. But others, mostly Black and brown people, often do not. Their plight is not war, but it’s war-like. Every day they face the violence of drug lords, as well as extreme poverty and political turmoil. How the Biden administration addresses this fact is critical.