Could monkeypox at the border justify reinstating Title 42?
Tiana Lowe
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Since the coronavirus pandemic became endemic, President Joe Biden has been legally justified in ending pandemic-era emergency declarations, including Title 42 expulsions.
Meanwhile, although the stateside vaccination campaign succeeded in bringing monkeypox cases down from more than 450 per day to just a handful, monkeypox cases are reportedly surging beyond the southern border. Mexico, which refuses to authorize the monkeypox vaccine, has seen a precipitous spike in cases, reaching a global high of 72 last week.
Politico goes into the details of the situation worsening across the border, as well as the stark differences between the public health campaign in the U.S., which especially targeted the gay and bisexual men at the highest risk of contracting the disease, and in Mexico.
The monkeypox fatality rate is low, but it’s higher than COVID. And although COVID has become endemic in the U.S., we have succeeded in quelling our monkeypox outbreak — for now. All of this raises the possibility that the Biden administration consider invoking Title 42 for monkeypox, which absolutely fits the communicable disease standard of the original law.
The consideration would be good for the country and good in particular for Biden, who finally wants to move on from the pandemic but is still beleaguered by the border crisis.
Biden’s unilateral decision to rip up the “Remain in Mexico” and “Safe Third Country” agreements that had staunched the flow to the southern border under the Trump administration has caused the highest rate of crossings along the southern border in documented history. But even then, Biden benefited from Trump’s invocation of Title 42, which allowed him to expel, not apprehend, hundreds of thousands of immigrants crossing the border each month.
The blowback of Biden’s handling of the border has bled across the aisle, with prominent Democrats such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams calling out his party’s likely 2024 nominee for the crisis coming as far north as the Big Apple.
Biden lacks the legal or logical basis to reverse his Title 42 walkback with regard to COVID, but monkeypox may give him a solution to ameliorate a very real problem.
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