The United States government insists that President Joe Biden’s priority is to promote “safe, orderly, humane and regular migration” and stresses that, in no case, “is the border open for irregular migration”, despite the doubts raised after end of Title 42a measure that will be inactive at midnight this Thursday.
“And that will not change after the end of the Title 42 public health order because the United States continues to enforce its immigration laws,” said Marta Youth, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the Department of Population, Refugees and Migration. US State during a conference call to address this issue.
He also stresses that the White House recognizes that in order to achieve stability on the country’s southern border, a joint plan is required. “We need comprehensive regional and global action to address these complex issues,” he added, stating that “addressing the challenges of irregular migration, providing protection to refugees and asylum seekers, and offering legal migration pathways are key priorities for the Administration” led by Biden.
“Solid plan on the border”
In recent weeks, there has been great concern about the end of Title 42 and the entry into force of Title 8, which obliges authorities to follow the rules on asylum application processes. Given this, the US official assures that there is “a solid plan to manage the border.”
“We are leading regional efforts with partner countries to strengthen access to protection for those who need it, assist in efforts to integrate refugees and immigrants into their communities, expand access to legal pathways to the United States, and strengthen country capacities. to humanely manage their borders,” he said.
In recent months, some of the Latin American countries had expressed their concern about the limited capacity to accommodate migrant flows, and this was discussed again at the Summit of Cities of the Americas held a couple of weeks ago in the city of Denver, Colorado.
Undersecretary Youth has assured that, aware of this situation, “assistance to host countries throughout the Western Hemisphere is being increased to help them integrate refugees and immigrants and provide assistance and protection to vulnerable populations throughout the region” .
“And we are also making legal pathways accessible from South and Central America,” a policy that, according to her, is intended to “help migrants travel safely and regularly enter the United States instead of putting themselves in the hands of traffickers, migrants and criminal organizations”.
The role of regional centers
The objective is that in these regional centers “a prior evaluation of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants” can be carried out so that they can later “access legal channels”. “Asylum seekers will be evaluated in these offices to determine if they may be eligible for refugee status or other legal pathways in the United States and eventually in other countries such as Canada and Spain,” she confirmed.
Although it clarifies that with the implementation of new systems to process asylum processes, it is expected to make more evaluations and identify more eligible people, “the entry criteria to be a refugee in the United States will not change.”
“Our priority in the region continues to focus on supporting regularization and integration efforts for people who are in the region and would like to stay, but we are also building those regular legal pathways,” he added.
For his part, the undersecretary for border policy and immigration of the Department of Homeland Security, Blas Núñez-Neto, has warned of the “effort” that the White House has made to “impose new consequences on those who cross the border illegally.”
“As part of this effort, we have managed a historic expansion in the legal channels to the United States, such as the parole processes that begin with sponsors for nationals of Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela, which have already admitted more than 100,000 people to the country. in a safe and orderly manner,” he said.
In addition, recently, the government also announced its intention to expand family reunification programs such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia.
Border Deployment
But given the end of Title 42 and the foreseeable arrival of thousands of migrants at the border, the White House has launched a great device.
“We have more than 24,000 law enforcement officers at the border and at points of entry, we have deployed nearly a thousand additional people from other government agencies, and we have many people supporting the effort with more than a thousand border patrol processing coordinators.” , he detailed.
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