Biden Kept Trump-Era Law To Expel Illegal Immigrants Over COVID-19. He’s Barely Using It.

The Biden administration turned back a fraction of illegal immigrant families crossing the U.S. southern border last week.

President Joe Biden kept in place an emergency regulation called “Title 42,” enacted by former President Donald Trump, which grants border officials the authority to expel illegal immigrant families over COVID-19 concerns. The U.S. Border Patrol used it to block 13% of families entering the U.S. illegally from March 14 to March 21, allowing the other 87% into the country for processing, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data viewed by Axios.

Biden’s limited use of Title 42 authority comes as illegal immigrants are flooding the border in numbers not seen in decades. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that the Border Patrol is on pace to apprehend more illegal immigrants at the border this year than in the past two decades.

Of the illegal immigrants not expelled at the border, some are turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Biden administration has approved for ICE to spend $86 million in taxpayer funds on hotel rooms in Arizona and Texas to house the illegal immigrants.

Border agents have also begun releasing some of the illegal immigrants without setting a court date for them to return for their asylum hearings. The immigrants are released into the interior U.S. purportedly with the responsibility on them to set their own court date to process their asylum claims.

Border facilities used to house migrants and their children are overflowing and significantly above capacity. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) leaked photos from one such facility in Donna, Texas, on Monday. The facility is composed of eight “pods” that each have a capacity of 260 occupants. One pod had as many as 400 unaccompanied male minors, the congressman said.

The Biden administration has enlisted the help of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support Border officials with processing and housing illegal immigrants. The administration has maintained that the situation at the border is not a crisis, however.

“The federal government is responding to the arrival of record numbers of individuals, including unaccompanied children, at the southwest border. Since April 2020, the number of encounters at the border has been rising due to ongoing violence, natural disasters, food insecurity, and poverty in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America,” DHS said in a statement last week. “The federal government is working around the clock to move unaccompanied children from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) care and to place them with a family member or sponsor until their immigration case is adjudicated.  The risks posed by the spread of COVID-19 have made this mission all the more difficult.”

“I am grateful for the exceptional talent and responsiveness of the FEMA team,” Mayorkas added.  “I am incredibly proud of the agents of the Border Patrol, who have been working around the clock in difficult circumstances to take care of children temporarily in our care. Yet, as I have said many times, a Border Patrol facility is no place for a child. We are working in partnership with HHS to address the needs of unaccompanied children, which is made only more difficult given the protocols and restrictions required to protect the public health and the health of the children themselves. Our goal is to ensure that unaccompanied children are transferred to HHS as quickly as possible, consistent with legal requirements and in the best interest of the children.”

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