President Joe Biden vows that on May 11 he’ll end the use of Title 42 to turn away migrants.
Yet he has no plans to deal with the flood of newcomers the move will unleash — with as many as 40,000 now already massed on the Mexican side, alarming officials.
And last week, he all but admitted it.
On Monday, Biden signed a bill ending the national COVID emergency.
Yet a similar public-health-emergency declaration that allows border agents to bar migrants under Title 42 will remain in effect until next month. Huh?
Team Biden says it needs more time to get “policies in place” before ending Title 42.
“The Administration supports an orderly, predictable wind-down of Title 42, with sufficient time to put alternative policies in place,” an Office of Management and Budget statement Monday read.
Translation: Biden’s folks have no plan yet.
And there’s scant reason to think they’ll have any serious one a month from now.
In January, recall, they rolled out a supposedly major shift to stem the tide, letting officials deny immigrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti the chance to apply for asylum if they crossed the border illegally.
Yet 30,000 of those migrants (360,000 a year) would be allowed to migrate here if they met certain criteria. And even those denied represent only a fraction of the migrants.
Anyway, migrant encounters topped 212,000 in February (the month after the announcement) — 11% more than February 2022 and four times as much as Donald Trump’s last February as president.
This month, Team Biden said it would increase use of a decades-old law that has asylum-seekers interviewed at the border.
Yet it admits that would affect only a small number of migrants. And most would likely be allowed to remain anyway, no matter how weak their asylum claims.
Ditto for possible plans to reinstate Trump- and Obama-era family detention.
Under the rules the Bidenites contemplate, those families would still be released after just a few weeks.
Indeed, the president’s commitment to lefty views on migrants’ rights leaves his enforcement choices hopelessly limited.
As the Center for Immigrations Studies’ Mark Krikorian notes, any tough-sounding policies the prez may roll out will contain all kinds of loopholes.
Let’s be honest: Biden doesn’t give a damn about border enforcement.
More than 6 million illegal migrants have rushed the border during his tenure, with about 4 million either set free or escaping interception entirely.
The onslaught has wreaked havoc on not just border towns but cities like New York that can’t afford the enormous costs to accommodate them.
It’s also fueled the fentanyl plague.
And it’s guaranteed to grow worse when Title 42 ends.