White House communications director Kate Bedingfield previewed the policy change during a briefing on Wednesday, telling reporters that the move is being made at the recommendation of top federal health authorities.
“This is a decision we have long deferred to CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention),” she said. The CDC, saying it conferred with the Department of Homeland Security,
announced the change would go into effect at the end of May.
It’s past time to say good riddance to Title 42: It was bad policy during the Trump administration, and it has been bad policy under Biden. Title 42 is legally questionable and morally indefensible. Its use put migrants in danger under the dubious justification of public health.
Title 42 is
part of a 1944 health law that prohibits the entry of people into the US when there is a “serious danger to the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States.” The Trump administration invoked the policy in March 2020, when the Covid-19 virus was rapidly spreading throughout the country and around the world, and when there was no vaccine in sight. Since then, US Customs and Border Protection statistics show that
1.7 million migrants have been sent back across the southern US border to Mexico, or repatriated to their country of origin.
From the start, Trump’s invocation of Title 42 was
driven by politics, not by legitimate health concerns. In fact, when the Trump administration sought to implement the law, the CDC doctor who oversaw the regulation
refused to comply.
Instead, then-Vice President Mike Pence
used his authority to issue an order closing the borders to migrants. Olivia Troye, a Pence adviser at the White House who later said she
resigned over the Trump administration’s handling of Covid-19, denounced the measure as a “Stephen Miller special” — a reference to a senior Trump former advisor
notorious for his extreme anti-immigration stance.
Title 42 was always a border control measure masquerading as public health policy. Covid-19 was
already rampant in the US by the time the policy went into effect, and the law was never applied to air travelers or US citizens crossing the border. It was only used as a pretext for keeping out migrants who were mostly brown, Black and economically vulnerable.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has
said that expelling migrants “is not the solution to an outbreak.” Meanwhile, an article in last month’s New England Journal of Medicine
found that there “is no public health evidence that singling out asylum seekers or other migrants …is effective in stemming the spread of Covid-19.”
In addition to being immoral and ineffective, the use of Title 42 as a border control measure is also probably illegal.
Under US law, asylum-seekers have the right to make their claims for humanitarian relief. The US is a signatory to international agreements that recognize similar rights for refugees. Title 42 trampled on these rights by allowing immigration authorities to expel migrants without providing them with an opportunity to make their asylum cases. In 2021, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called on Washington to lift Title 42, so that migrants could access the asylum process, “in line with international legal and human rights obligations.”
Part of what made Title 42 so morally reprehensible is that it placed thousands of migrants in harm’s way. A 2021 research team for Physicians for Human Rights
found that people expelled under the measure were subjected to violence once they were returned to Mexican border cities. And Title 42 has been applied inconsistently:
Refugees from Ukraine have been allowed to claim asylum at the border, while those
from Haiti have been expelled and sent back to unsafe conditions at home. This glaring double standard is simply unacceptable.
Now, with Covid-19 restrictions being lifted across country, there’s even less justification for continuing to keep…
Read More: Opinion: Good riddance to this terrible Trump-era policy decision