Title 42 has severely limited asylum cases since the Trump administration put the public health order in place in 2020. Will the Biden administration revocation make it easier for refugees to enter U.S.?
Title 42 has plugged up the asylum system since it was put in place at the start of the coronavirus crisis. Since March 2020, U.S. border officials have used the policy to quickly remove migrants by sending them back to Mexico or to their home countries.
But now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says migrants are not a public health threat, so Title 42 will come to an end on May 23.
Today, we talk about the ramifications of the controversial public health order.
Guests: L.A. Times immigration reporter Andrea Castillo
More reading:
Biden administration could revoke controversial border policy blocking asylum in weeks
Biden administration announces asylum system overhaul: What you need to know
This is an unedited transcription created mostly by robots who don't always get things exactly right (especially when it comes to proper nouns or languages other than English). Sorry for any confusion, mistakes or problems our robot friends may cause.
[00:00:00] Gustavo: A controversial immigration policy is coming to an end
Title 42 has plugged up the asylum system since it was first enacted at the start of the coronavirus crisis. It became a tool that allowed border officials to quickly and more easily remove migrants. Undercover of pandemic previous. By sending them back to Mexico or to their home countries. But now the centers for disease control and prevention, they say title 42 has got to come to an end on May 23rd. The decision has some celebrating the fact that asylum seekers, many stuck in makeshift camps at the border for the past couple of years, maybe they might finally find some relief, but others say the end of the policy is just going to encourage too many asylum seekers to head to the U S Mexico border.
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[00:00:48] Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano, you're listening to the daily news from the LA county. It's Monday, April 4th, 2022.
Today. How Title 42, essentially shut down the us asylum system and the overhaul underway to try and open it back up.
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Gustavo: Andrea Castillo covers immigration for the Los Angeles times. Andrea, welcome to the times.
[00:01:13] Andrea: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:15] Gustavo: So asylum has been a part of the U S immigration system since in their own way, the pilgrims going back way in the day and the policies around it has always been controversial of course, in political. And so there was a lot of controversy going through the Trump administration when asylum really slowed down at least accepting asylum folks. But generally, how did the system work and how has it changed since 2016??
[00:01:39] Andrea: So before the pandemic started migrants who were encountered near the border were screened by asylum officers with the department of Homeland security, for any fears of persecution. And the ones who passed an initial screening would have their cases moved over to the immigration courts where a judge would then decide whether they qualified for asylum or some other form of protection. And they could stay in the U S and in the meantime, People were either detained or released at some point until their final court hearing. But even before the Trump administration and before the pandemic started, that process would take months or years.
[00:02:14] Gustavo: Oh yeah. You, I mean yourself and myself, we've known far too many people personally, whose asylum cases have dragged on. For basically, since they were kids all the way into adulthood. And then really, even during the Obama administration, you would start to hear and see families that were separated. Seeking asylum, kids would be sleeping on floors. There would be because of just so many people trying to come in seeking asylum refugee camps on the Mexico side of the U S-Mexico border. What happened then? Like in these like past decade or so, that caused this backlog
[00:02:46] Andrea: There has been a backlog in the immigration courts for a really long time.
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[00:02:50] Clip: asylum law is growing crazy right now in the United States. The system is extremely overwhelmed.
[00:02:59] Andrea: At some point they just couldn't keep up with the numbers of people who were winding through the system. And it just worsened really significantly under the Trump administration.
[00:03:09] Clip: My administration has done more than any administration in history to secure our Southern border. Our border has never been more secure.
[00:03:16] Andrea: And then Biden inherited that. And so the pandemic did not help. It slowed everything down. Courts were shut for months at a time. And once things reopened, there was just this even bigger backlog of cases that they had to deal with.
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[00:03:31] Gustavo: And a lot of that backlog was because of this Title 42, which came under the Trump administration. How and why did that policy get put into place? And then, how have border officials been using it?
[00:03:43] Andrea: Yeah. So it started in March of 2020, and it was, you know, in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19 at the time, there was pressure from the former vice president, Mike Pence and from Stephen Miller, who was a top Trump aide who wanted to put restrictions on immigration
[00:04:01] Gustavo: On all immigration.
[00:04:02] Andrea: Right. And so experts at the centers for disease control and prevention objected at the time. And they said that the policy was going to do not much to stop the spread of coronavirus and that it was essentially like scientifically baseless. But Pence ordered the CDC director to use the agency's emergency powers to seal the U S borders anyway. And so that policy. It hearkens back to this 1944 public health statute about communicable diseases. And so because of the emergency nature, it's essentially used to supersede all other us laws, which includes the right of migrants to seek asylum and to prevent them from being persecuted and returned to countries where they face harm and to protect unaccompanied children who are vulnerable to being tracked.
[00:04:51] Gustavo: So then title 42 was just a way for the Trump administration to just not only deny people seeking asylum into the United States, but also just if they did come in just deport them as fast as possible.
[00:05:03] Andrea: Exactly over the past couple of years, border authorities have used title 42 to expel migrants in about 60% of all encounters. That's more than 1.7 million expulsions.
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[00:05:18] Andrea: Other people have gotten in with humanitarian exemptions, but you know, essentially how it works is people are either quickly returned to Mexico or they're flown out of the U S like in the case of Haitians. And most recently.
[00:05:30] Gustavo: Yeah. We had an episode about just the refugee camp of Haitians right there on the U S Mexico border on the Texas side. And almost all of them were rounded up and sent back to Haiti, like, like that.
[00:05:42] Andrea: Right. And those flights have continued
[00:05:45] Gustavo: and they're continuing.
More after the break.
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[00:06:02] Gustavo: We're back with my LA times colleague Andrea Castillo. So Andrea, why was Title 42 so controversial? What were the arguments for it and what were the arguments against it?
[00:06:13] Andrea: So Title 42 is hands down one of the most controversial and restrictive immigration policies that have ever been in enacted.
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[00:06:21] Andrea: It resulted in asylum seekers being placed in unsafe conditions
[00:06:26] Clip: People are sleeping on the dirt in makeshift shelters.
[00:06:30] Andrea: It led to these tent camps with really squalid conditions in Tijuana and other border towns in Mexico.
[00:06:37] Clip: My wife, she's pregnant, she's sleeping on the floor without a bed.
[00:06:42] Andrea: Human Rights Watch actually recorded almost 10,000 kidnappings instances of torture, rape, and other violent attacks on people in Mexico because of title 42.
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[00:06:53] Andrea: But officials said that the policy was necessary to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Not only that, but also for the safety of the migrants themselves. But even though it's supposed to be this public health policy and decidedly, not like a political immigration strategy, Republicans and even some Democratic lawmakers, which includes senators from Arizona have recently warned revoking the policy because they say it's just going to cause more migrants to arrive at the border and overwhelmed the resources that are there.
[00:07:23] Gustavo: How did Title 42 impact the way people would actually go into the United States? I'm thinking like the migration paths, like the trails that they would do or ways into it?
[00:07:34] Andrea: People say that title 42 made it more difficult to reach the U S. And so essentially what that did was push migrants to make these more desperate attempts to get into the country.
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[00:07:47] Clip: Three people died and 30 were put in the hospital after this boat filled with migrants from Mexico flipped over in the waters of San Diego.
[00:07:58] Andrea: That has included increased crossings by sea where the conditions make it even scarier for people to get to the US. You know, crossing on these rickety boats that are just packed full of people. Border agents stopped more migrants at sea in 2020 than they did during the previous three years. One incident in 2020 involved almost two dozen migrants trying to reach the U S and the boat capsized and three people drowned. One of those people was Maria Chavez Segovia, who was a 41-year-old mother of two. And that was her fifth time trying to cross the border. She had made three attempts to cross the border by land, but each time she was returned to Tijuana within a couple of hours under Title 42. But after her third attempt by land, she told her sister that she didn't think that she was going to make it over the border without getting caught again. So she tried a sea crossing and that didn't work.
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[00:09:08] Gustavo: President Biden when he was a candidate, he was blasting a lot of Trump's immigration policies. And he vowed that if he got elected, he'd roll them back. And on his first day in office, he did roll back a lot of them like the remain in Mexico policy that would make people seeking asylum stay in Mexico. And then he had to reinstate it of course because of legal challenge. But Biden kept Title 42 until just recently.
[00:09:31] Andrea: That's right. So he continued to use that policy and even defendant in court, despite this mounting pressure from immigrant advocates. And now from, you know, a lot of democratic lawmakers. They said that halting the policy was going to require the government to detain people in facilities that just weren't equipped for the pandemic. They couldn't do physical distancing. They couldn't quarantine. And they couldn't like sufficiently isolate people. But the Biden administration did eventually change the policy. So. Now it applies to adults who are traveling alone and parents who are traveling with their children. Last year, the administration exempted children who were traveling without a parent from being expelled under the policy. And this month, the CDC formally ended that policy for unaccompanied children. And they said that their expulsion is not warranted to protect the public health.
[00:10:27] Gustavo: So is that why Title 42 is coming to an end now?
[00:10:30] Andrea: Yeah, so the CDC essentially makes a reassessment about whether the policy is still needed every 60 days. But at this point, there's this growing consensus that the administration is on shaky ground when it comes to defending, you know, what they're calling a public health order at the same time that pandemic conditions have improved and all these restrictions have been lifted and officials knew that they could not use this policy forever. It was always supposed to be temporary.
[00:10:57] Gustavo: Once there was even a rumor that Title 42 was going to be revoked; people on both sides of the immigration debate,. they immediately started talking about it. They had their opinions.
[00:11:08] Andrea: Yeah. So people were either praising the decision…
[00:11:11] Clip: And don't let anyone convince you that this is a bad thing,
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[00:11:14] Clip: Or that it's going to create a surge at the border or anything like that. We had asylum processing mechanisms in place for decades before they were ended by the Trump administration
Voicemail: It was used as a pretext during COVID. It was cowardly moved by the Trump administration.
Voicemail: The answer to a pandemic is not to deport people.
[00:11:35] Andrea: or their criticizing. Saying that it's going to cause this, you know, huge influx of people and result in overcrowded facilities at the border.
[00:11:44] Clip: Did you guys hear? Bidenn administration is going to remove title 42? What this administration does makes no sense, no sense at all.
[00:11:53] Andrea: And of course, dealing with the border is a delicate issue for Biden, particularly ahead of midterm elections. So he's been facing pressure on both sides from Democrats and Republicans on this issue.
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[00:12:08] Gustavo: After the break Biden's new plan to overhaul the asylum system.
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[00:12:17] Gustavo: Welcome back under that last month, the Biden administration announced the final version of its long awaited plan to overhaul the US asylum system. What's in it?
[00:12:28] Andrea: Asylum seekers are going to have their claims heard by an asylum officer with a us citizenship and immigration services instead of waiting for a final determination from an immigration judge. And so the administration hopes that the new process will take several months as opposed to years and under the rule, anyone who. Denied protection by an asylum officer could request reconsideration within a week. And if they are turned down for that, then they could ask an immigration judge to review their application. And then later file more appeals with different courts. But after all their appeals are exhausted or if they don't pursue anything, then the person would be subject to deportation. It's important to note that the rule does not apply to unaccompanied children who arrive without a parent.
[00:13:15] Gustavo: What would happen to them?
[00:13:17] Andrea: They are put through a different system. So this system is a fast track. It's called expedited removal, and children don't go through the expedited removal.
[00:13:27] Gustavo: Okay. So how soon then can asylum seekers expect to see actual change? Like will the people who have been in the migrant camps on the board of the people who have been trying to come in, will they be able finally to get to move on into the country?
[00:13:42] Andrea: So the new policy is supposed to take effect on May 28th and that's two months after it was published in the federal register. And so with Title 42 gone, people at the border could start being processed under the new asylum rules. Officials did say, though, that it's going to take a while to ramp up the resources on the border. And that only a small group of people are going to go through the new system initially.
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[00:14:04] Andrea: But, since there are so many migrants waiting on the Mexican side of the border already, there could be this processing bottleneck at first. Once both changes are fully in place. The asylum processing itself should be much faster. If everything goes according to plan.
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[00:14:22] Andrea: It doesn't seem like DHS is going to slowly wind down its use of Title 42. The secretary Ella hunter Majorca said that the agency is going to continue expelling solo adults and families right up until May 23rd. And in a call with reporters on Friday, administration officials said that they're looking for ways to streamline processing at ports of entry. Mioca said that DHS has transferred more than 600 agents to the border already and is going to refer smugglers and certain migrants who crossed the border without authorization for criminal prosecution. And on a different policy that's known as remain in Mexico, requires some asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for us immigration court hearings. That policy has affected around 1500 people in the last three months. But DHS officials said that they're going to use it a lot more. Once Title 42 is lifted. So that would mean more people waiting out there, hearings on the Mexican side of the border.
BEAT
Andrea: DHS also announced earlier this week that it has started requiring COVID-19 vaccines for certain migrants who are encountered at the Southern border. And they plan to expand their capacity to give those vaccines in the coming weeks to 6,000 vaccines daily at 27 different border locations.
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[00:15:41] Gustavo: Is all of this going to go according to plan? Is Biden's asylum system actually going to work?
[00:15:48] Andrea: Yeah, I think it's a wait and see kind of situation. Supporters are saying that the new policy is going to improve. A lot of people have said as a scary process for migrants who are traumatized, um, because instead of having to recount their worst experiences in a court setting where they're defending themselves against deportation, they can make their case in an asylum off. Sitting across a desk from an asylum officer in a much more intimate setting, but a lot of people are worried that the changes are failing to help the people who they're supposed to protect, because it doesn't give trauma survivors enough time to find a lawyer or gather their evidence or recover before they have to make their case to the asylum officer.
[00:16:32] Gustavo: Are there any challenges from Biden's opponents to what he's proposing?
[00:16:37] Andrea: Yeah. I think a lot of Republicans have reacted to the plan with skepticism. They think that it's not going to do enough to stop people from coming to the border and that moving people quicker through the system is still putting them in the system.
[00:16:54] Gustavo: And also people who just don't want more people in this country.
[00:16:57] Andrea: Exactly.
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[00:17:02] Gustavo: Andrea, thank you so much for this conversation.
[00:17:04] Andrea: Thanks, Gustavo.
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[00:17:31] Gustavo: That's it for this episode at the times, daily news from the LA times.
Tomorrow, the first of a two part series into the January 6th, US capital insurrection investigation.
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