In the United States, the validity of Title 42, which governed US immigration policy since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, ended. Now measures aimed at dissuading the entry of undocumented people into the country are coming into operation, while pro-migrant organizations denounce these regulations and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Unicef request guarantees for migrants.
Between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, United States, the tension decreased in the last hours, once Title 42 expired, at 11:50 p.m. on May 11. The measure, established by the Government of Donald Trump, expired giving way to regulations with which President Joe Biden seeks to stop the entry of undocumented migrants into the country.
The hours and days leading up to the completion of Title 42 were chaotic at the border. With citizens from other countries who had frequently crossed rivers, scaled walls or faced armed groups on a route that led them to the southern border of the United States. This with the hope of arriving before Title 8 entered into force, which will govern from now on the entry of migrants and refugees into the nation.
This new regulation considers as “unfit” to request asylum those people who cross the border irregularly and those who, on their journey to reach US territory, have not previously requested protection in a third country.
The chaotic situation of the last days that accumulated thousands of migrants at the border and caused an increase in arrests, more than 10,000 daily, was accompanied by the uncertainty of how the treatment will be for the thousands of migrants and refugees who will continue to arrive all days at the border.
Amid the tension, the ACLU, the National Center for Immigrant Justice and the Hastings Center for Gender and Refugee Studies filed a lawsuit before a judge in California, alleging that the new regulations violate the law. Americans and international agreements on migration.
Amid multiple criticisms of Title 8, US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended Biden’s regulation, saying it is intended to encourage migrants to enter using legal pathways instead of crossing illegally. irregular.
Mayorkas and other government officials have also sent the message in recent days that unauthorized crossings will face consequences. “The border is not open,” he said in an interview Thursday night, in which he also noted that 24,000 Border Patrol agents and officers arrived on the ground to enforce the country’s laws.
The lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other civil society organizations complains that the immigration policies that Biden is now interposing are similar to others that Donald Trump had already tried to implement at the beginning of his term and that were also successfully denounced by these organizations. Now they have asked the same California-based federal judge who blocked Trump’s initiatives to do the same with Biden’s.
For the moment, from Mexico, the country’s chancellor, Marcelo Ebrard, maintained that the migratory flow at the border has decreased during the first hours after Title 42 was finalized. “In short, to summarize, the flow is decreasing daily today. At least until now, we have not had confrontations or situations of violence on the border,” he said.
UNHCR, IOM and Unicef ask for guarantees, Title 42 expired
This Friday, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) called in a joint statement for better initiatives for the reception of migrants and asylum seekers. Both agencies stressed that Title 42 should have stopped applying “a long time ago.”
The two organizations criticized the new regulations and assured that they are “incompatible with the principles of international refugee law.” They also recalled “that the agreements between States for the return of migrants cannot violate the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits repatriating people who come from countries where their lives may be in danger”picks up the EFE news agency.
In addition, the joint communiqué stressed that “most people on the move in the Americas are hosted by communities in Latin America”.
For her part, the executive director of Unicef, Catherine Russell, asserted that every day there are millions of boys and girls on the move in Latin America, who frequently flee natural disasters, violence or poverty in their countries and said that all of them “have the right to request asylum, to be protected from harm and to remain with their families.”.
Migration, a topic of political division in the United States
On Thursday, May 11, the House of Representatives, dominated by Republican legislators, voted in favor of building more border walls on the southern border, in an act of rejection of the entry into force of Biden’s new immigration policies that demonstrate the political division regarding migration and a pulse from conservatives for making it difficult for anyone who does not have the required documentation to enter the country.
Title 42 was implemented by Trump in March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread across borders and US health officials urged to stop the flow of migrants, guidelines that allowed authorities to quickly expel migrants to Mexico and other countries.
It is estimated that more than 2.7 million migrants were expelled under Title 42, although among these cases there are also people returned more than once. At the time, the policy dovetailed with Trump’s anti-immigration hawkish line and was widely criticized by Democrats.
Biden even went so far as to promise to repeal Trump’s immigration policies during the campaign, but far from that he ended up keeping Title 42 and expanding it. However, a greater arrival of migrants during the Biden Administration has put the president on the ropes, who now has low popularity in his management of migration on the southern border – with an approval of 26% – according to a poll published by Reuters/Ipsos this week.
With Reuters, EFE and AP
