On Monday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” former Director of Border Management on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council Andrea Flores stated that the lifting of Title 42 “is becoming a far greater emergency than it ever needed to be” and cited the announcement that troops will be deployed, the large amounts of people already on the streets of border communities, and shelters complaining that they weren’t talked to by the Biden administration until recently.
Flores said, “So, anyone who works in border policy and migration policy knows that sudden changes to our immigration policies at the border can trigger the movement of people in really extreme ways. … Title 42 was always a temporary authority. It was justified by public health reasons. The Biden administration, from day one, we knew that Title 42 was going to come to an end and that it was going to be a difficult operational transition to restore the normal border processing that we’ve always had.”
She continued, “So, what I am concerned about is you see the announcement that troops are being deployed, you are seeing thousands of people already on the streets of communities like El Paso, you’re hearing from shelter providers that they haven’t been engaged on what this transition will look like until a few weeks ago. So, I’m concerned that, with all of this lead time, that this is becoming a far greater emergency than it ever needed to be. And that has really negative impacts on the migrants themselves who are going through this process, on border communities, on law enforcement, and also just on our national debate on immigration, which is already very heated and really difficult for people to understand where we are in this moment.”
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