Joe Biden has successfully run out the clock on Title 42, the rule that allowed the government to severely restrict immigration at the border as the Supreme Court canceled oral arguments for the suit that would have been decided in the Spring.
The lawsuit was brought by several GOP border states when the Biden administration first tried to cancel Title 42 last year. The Supreme Court issued an injunction preventing the administration from ending Title 42 until the court could hear the case. Since then, the Biden administration announced an end to the pandemic emergency beginning on May 11, 2023, making the continuation of Title 42 moot.
But the GOP states aren’t giving up. They intend to file suit to extend the deadline for the COVID-19 emergency beyond May 11. This will be a tough sell given that Title 42 is an emergency measure and without an “emergency,” it will be hard to get the court to simply declare one.
Should Title 42 end in May, it would be ending at a time when migrant encounters typically increase. Officials had predicted last year up to 14,000 encounters a day when the order ends.
But without any new move by Republican states, the move by the administration and now the courts again sets a timeline on the end of the order, which has been used as a stopgap by the Biden administration to prevent mass releases into the interior amid a historic migrant crisis that has seen millions of migrants hit the border in the last two years.
Court records show that the policy has been used more than 2.5 million times to expel migrants at the southern border.
Border encounters along the southwest border were down about 40% in January thanks to new rules that allow border patrol to expel all but 30,000 asylum seekers each from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. But this “parole” system is also being challenged in court and will likely be declared illegal given the parole program was meant to cover a small number of individuals not tens of thousands of asylum seekers.
RJ Hauman, head of government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said the plan is “one big shell game.”
“They finally realized the crisis was beginning to become a political liability, so what was their solution? Unlawful parole abuse and processing at ports of entry through an app. This is the end result — lower numbers. It’s all a sham and it’s illegal,” he told Fox News Digital.
“Shell game” or not, there are plenty of people in other nations in Central and South America that might take the restrictions on those four countries as an invitation to head north. February numbers of border encounters will probably be a lot different.
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