Article 42

President Joe Biden visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday for the first time as president, amid controversy and backlash about the administration’s allocation of resources to the southern border. The visit came days after he Title 42 was created to address public health and social welfare and grants the government the ability to take emergency action in numerous ways, including to “stop the introduction of communicable diseases.” While the code has been in place for decades, it was used widely beginning in March 2020 by the administration of then-President Donald Trump in order to regulate border crossings under the premise of increased COVID-19 precautions. The Trump administration used Title 42 to “essentially to override immigration law that Watch the conversation in the player above. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) invoked Title 42 at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, it gave border patrol agents the authority to expel migrants to their home country or the country they were last in, which was often Mexico. Since 2020, there have been Bypassing the asylum process and sending migrants back to Mexico without due process immediately after their arrival to the U.S. didn’t deter them from attempting to cross or re-cross the U.S.-Mexico border in many cases, in part because “it pushed people back out of the country without any consequence to future immigration applications.” Many people arriving at the southern border are “hoping for help a...

Read more The federal government and US states and cities on the border are trying to How did Title 42 start? In March 2020, under Donald Trump, the CDC issued an order limiting migration into the US, saying it was necessary to reduce the spread of Covid. The order made use of little-used laws dating back more than a century that authorized border officials to immediately remove migrants, including people seeking asylum, overriding their normal rights. The government argued that areas where migrants were held on the US side of the border after crossing without permission often were not designed to quarantine people or for social distancing. Migrant and human rights advocates condemned Title 42 as a ploy to stop immigration. The Biden administration continued the policy amid legal battles and criticism from left and right. Liberals say the government is undermining asylum rights and breaking campaign promises about creating a fair and humane system. Rightwingers use inflammatory language about a migrant “invasion” and accuse Joe Biden of running an “open border”. Title 42 has been used more than 2.8m times since 2020 to expel migrants back across the border. Some people have been exempt, including children traveling alone. But there have been mind-boggling variations in who the law is applied to and how it is enforced, resulting in widespread confusion and, often, chaos at the border. Why is Title 42 ending? The The CDC announced in April 2022 that the rule was no longer ne...

Title 42, a controversial Trump-era policy that allowed for the rapid expulsion of asylum seekers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, is set to expire at midnight Friday. The rule’s expiration has sparked concerns about a surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. But what is Title 42, why is it ending and what happens next? What is Title 42? A U.S. Border Patrol agent leads a line of women to a van as they wait to apply for asylum between two border walls Thursday, May 11, 2023, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull) Title 42 is the entire section of U.S. federal regulations that pertain to public health. However, it has come to refer to a specific rule within that section that allows the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to block noncitizens from entering the U.S. for public health purposes. The Trump administration implemented the rule in the early stages of the pandemic, citing the “serious danger of the further introduction of COVID-19 into the United States,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The rule, which President Biden kept in place after taking office, has been used more than 2.8 million times since March 2020 to quickly expel migrants to Mexico or their home country without allowing them to seek asylum. Why is it expiring? Title 42’s expiration comes more than a year after the Biden administration first moved to rescind the order. (AP Photo/John Minchillo) Title 42 is set to expire Thursday at midnight as the COVID-19 pub...

WASHINGTON— Title 42, a decades-old public health statute used during the COVID-19 pandemic to keep asylum seekers out of the U.S., lifted at 8:59 p.m. PST on Thursday, ushering in a new era for U.S. border control. Orders under Title 42 were first implemented by the Trump administration in March 2020 and met with legal and political challenges, but remained in place through President Biden’s first years in office. Citing the threat of COVID-19, the U.S. government has over the last three years carried out nearly 2.8 million expulsions of migrants at the border without offering them the opportunity to request asylum. Title 42 drove border crossings up to record levels, in part because the nature of rapid expulsions made it easier for people to immediately attempt crossing again. Title 42 Here’s what you need to know. What is Title 42? Title 42 is a public health and welfare statute enacted in 1944 that gave the U.S. surgeon general the authority — later transferred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — to determine whether communicable disease in a foreign country poses a serious danger of spreading in the U.S., either by people or property entering the country. If the CDC finds that a disease poses a threat, it can, with approval from the president, temporarily prohibit people from entering the country to avert danger. That’s what happened at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, amid surging deaths from the virus, the Trump administration p...

SAN ANTONIO — There’s a lot of mention of “Title 42” lately. With it comes images of crowds of people crossing or on the banks of the Rio Grande, which divides the U.S. and Mexico. As it is expected to end Thursday, it might be a good time to understand what it's all about. Follow along for live updates on the end of Title 42 What is Title 42? Title 42 is a part of U.S. law that deals with public health, social welfare and civil rights. It gives the federal government the authority to take emergency action to keep communicable diseases out of the country. Before President Donald Trump used it in 2020, it had been used only Why has the use of Title 42 been controversial? Immigration and humanitarian groups accused the Trump administration of using the pandemic as a pretext to deny tens of thousands of people migrating to the U.S. the chance for humanitarian relief through asylum. They've also criticized the Biden administration for continuing to use it. The groups have said the measure stokes racism and allows for discrimination because some countries, such as Venezuela, had been exempt. The Biden administration started applying Title 42 to Venezuelans in October and began allowing 30,000 Venezuelans a month to enter the country through humanitarian parole, resulting in a drop in the number of Venezuelans crossing the border. In January, Mexico agreed to take more migrants expelled from the U.S., also helping to manage the numbers of people arriving at the border. But there...

In an increasingly hard line from the Biden administration, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Thursday evening that 24,000 border patrol agents and officers had been sent to the border to enforce US laws, adding: “The border is not open. “Starting tonight, people who arrive at the border without using a lawful pathway will be presumed ineligible for asylum. We are ready to humanely process and remove people without a legal basis to remain in the US,” he said. The secretary added on Friday morning, appearing on CNN, of migrants arriving at the southern border: “We are taking them into our custody, we are screening and vetting them and if they do not have a basis to remain, we will remove them very swiftly.” Additionally, the state department announced a new website aimed at informing migrants how to access legal pathways into the US. The site, In the hours before the new regulations went into effect, thousands of migrants waded through rivers, climbed walls and scrambled up embankments on to US soil, hoping to be processed before the new system went into effect at midnight US eastern time. In Matamoros, Mexico, at the eastern end of the border close to the Gulf of Mexico, groups crossed the Rio Grande river in chin-high water. Some carried tiny babies and bags of belongings above their heads to make it into Brownsville, Texas, to ask for refuge. They clutched cellphones above the water to light the way toward the US but, behind coils of razor w...