The New York Times reports that President Joe Biden’s decision to end Title 42 border protections could bring a surge of migrants amounting to 18,000 illegal crossings per day — a pace that works out to over 6.5 million migrants per year.
By comparison, there were close to 6,000 migrants per day encountered by Border Patrol in December 2021.
Title 42 is a pandemic-era protection that allows authorities to turn away migrants for reasons of slowing the spread of COVID-19, and it is one of the few border enforcement tools President Biden retained from the Donald Trump era.
The Biden administration will end Title 42 on May 23, according to reports earlier this week that were confirmed Friday.
According to the Times, the Department of Homeland Security is saying it expects up to 18,000 illegal crossings per day:
The Department of Homeland Security briefed lawmakers and reporters on Tuesday about its preparations for handling as many as 18,000 illegal crossings a day, which it considers a “mass irregular migration” situation. Officials said that federal agencies were coordinating with state and local officials to put in place additional personnel, transportation, detention facilities and medical assistance along the border. The department also released an official planning document for responding to different scenarios if there is a spike in illegal immigration.
Delaying the change until later this spring gives the administration more time to prepare. But Brandon Judd, the president of the Border Patrol union, said the agency could not adequately prepare for the change in one and a half months. Expelling migrants under the public health rule takes border officials about 15 minutes, he said, compared to the usual processing, which can take hours per person.
Given that roughly 2 million migrants entered the U.S. across the border in 2021, the coming surge would see at least three times as many migrants crossing the border. The Biden administration initially dismissed surging migration as seasonal.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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