Biden administration finalizes rule to deter illegal border crossings ahead of Title 42 ending
Mike Brest
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The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice finalized a new regulation to discourage illegal border crossings at the southern border ahead of the lifting of Title 42.
The new rule presumes that anyone who illegally enters the country is ineligible for asylum and allows the United States to deport them unless they are able to “establish a reasonable fear of persecution or torture in the country of removal,” DHS said in a statement. Border crossers can only rebut this presumption under “exceptionally compelling circumstances.”
BORDER FALLING INTO CHAOS AHEAD OF TITLE 42 END DATE: ‘WE’RE IN TROUBLE’
The regulation will go into effect once Title 42, a government-issued rule that allowed immigration officials to remove people from the country more quickly due to the coronavirus pandemic, ends on Thursday night at 11:59 p.m.
“This Administration has led the largest expansion of legal pathways for protection in decades, and this regulation will encourage migrants to seek access to those pathways instead of arriving unlawfully in the grip of smugglers at the southern border,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “At the same time, we continue to urge Congress to act on President Biden’s immigration reform proposal, bipartisan legislation to protect Dreamers and farm workers, and repeated requests for additional resources to hire more asylum officers and immigration judges so we can finally fix our long-broken immigration system.”
DHS is also surging resources to the border so it can handle the expected influx of migrants once Title 42 expires — specifically, 1,400 DHS personnel, 1,000 processing coordinators, and an additional 1,500 Department of Defense personnel, 500 of which have arrived at the border already.
The active-duty service members at the border will not be responsible for processing migrants or any law enforcement duties; rather, they will be there to free up immigration officials to do that.
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Once Title 42 expires, DHS will process individuals encountered at the border without proper travel documents using its longstanding Title 8 authorities, which incur stiffer penalties for those who are removed from the country, including a five-year ban on legal entry.
Immigration authorities will, however, also allow these individuals “an opportunity to avoid that tougher consequence by voluntarily returning” to their home country, Mayorkas said in a Wednesday press conference.