It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Title 42: How a Public Health Law Kills Refugees

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

James discusses the last three years of immigration policy and what they mean for people seeking refuge in the USA.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas,

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I hope you're enjoying your break as much as we are. I wanted to go back to my Title 42 episodes from earlier this year, specifically this May, because it seems like

we might be headed back towards Title 42, which is a disaster for the poor. It's a disaster for people seeking asylum in this country. And it's really just a disaster for no humanity. And so I wanted to return to the first episode of my series on Title 42, in which I explain how Trump and Biden administrations used a public health law to kill refugees. I hope you enjoy. You probably don't remember the passage of Title 42, let alone that of Title 42, Chapter 6a, Subchapter 2, Part G, Section 264.

But it's a part of US federal law that gives the government the authority to take emergency action to keep communicable diseases out of the country. The portion which allows a sweeping disregard for asylum law, passed in 1944, reads in one giant run-on paragraph sentence as follows. Whenever the Surgeon General determines that by reason of the existence of any communicable disease in one giant run-on paragraph sentence as follows. introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of the public health. The Surgeon General, in accordance with regulations approved by the President, shall have the power to prohibit in whole or in part the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate in order to avert such danger, and for such period of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose. Before President Donald Trump's administration used it on march 20th 2020 it had been used only

in 1929 to keep ships from china and the philippines from entering u.s ports during a meningitis outbreak but in march of 2020 when you probably weren't paying much attention because the world was falling apart or when i just returned from a work trip to rwanda where i was months before any precautions appeared in the USA, screened for a novel coronavirus, the Trump administration cited this public health law in instructions to the Department of Homeland Security on restrictions for migrants entering the United States. That very same day, Center for Disease Control Director Robert R. Redfield relied on this regulation to issue an order suspending the introduction

into the United States of certain individuals who had been in quote-unquote coronavirus-impacted areas and, quote, who would be introduced into a congregate setting at the port of entry or a border station. This includes individuals coming from Canada or Mexico who would normally be detained by CBP after arriving at the border, people including asylum seekers and accompanied children, and people attending to enter the United States between ports of entry. Citing the new CDC order, that same day, the Border Patrol began expelling individuals who arrived at the US-Mexico border without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum. Reports indicate the CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title 42, arguing that there was really no public health rationale to support it.

Ever since then, public health experts outside the CDC have continued to agree, arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travellers, there is no need to turn away refugees and expel them to their home countries or send them to Mexico. to agree, arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travellers, there is no need to turn away refugees and expel them to their home countries or send them to Mexico. Despite this, DHS has been applying Title 42 to migrants for three years since then, and people have been turned away without getting a chance to plead their case for asylum three million times. Now, Trump is no longer president, but Title 42 has persisted. It's actually persisted for much longer under Biden's watch, two years and four months, than it did under Trump, ten months. But we'll get to that part later. First,

let's look at what this bureaucratic wrinkle does when it's applied for three years across a land border spanning 3,145 kilometers, that's 1,954 miles for the Americans listening, at a time when climate change, economic decline, and state and non-state violence are driving more and more people towards the USA's southern border in the hope of a better life. We're talking about Title 42 this week because it ended on May 11th. In a sense, this marks an important change in immigration law, but in a sense it doesn't. Immigration was

complicated and cruel for migrants and profitable for people on both sides of the border before March of 2020. And it's the same after Title 42 has gone. But nonetheless, Title 42 represented a distinct change in how asylum works in the US, and especially when combined with other Trump policies that Biden has continued, a distinct change in how many people die when coming to this country to try and have a better chance at a safe future. By April of 2020, Title 42 expulsions at the border overtook the previous record for expulsions under the so-called Migrant Protection Protocol, which is better known as Remain in Mexico. That was set in August of 2019. Under an agreement reached with the Mexican government in late March of 2020, the Border Patrol began sending quote-unquote back to Mexico, most Mexican, but also Guatemalan, Honduran and Salvadoran families and single adults encountered at the border. This group of nationalities remained unchanged

until May of 2022 when the Biden administration came to an agreement with Mexico to accept quote-unquote thousands of Cubans and Nicaraguans sent from the United States to Mexico. But this doesn't really matter. You'll see that a lot in these episodes. Immigration law on the ground and immigration law in Washington, D.C. are two very different things. There has been extensive documentation of individuals expelled to Mexico who do not fit within these nationalities, including Haitian asylum seekers, some of whom I've spoken to myself. People who are expelled are often driven by bus to the nearest port of entry, that's a land border crossing, and told to walk back to Mexico, often without their luggage and other belongings. I've found that luggage and belongings, including ID cards, clothing,

and even little stuffed animals, all along the border in the three years since Title 42 has been in place. I asked my friend Paul to describe what we found in Texas when we'd been for a walk along the border wall during our time reporting on the National Butterfly Center there. You'd find driver's licenses. I believe at one point we found almost an information packet. It was for a teenager, a teenage girl. I remember that because we got pictures of it.

And then when we took that long walk, remember we walked down the border wall? It was a two, two and a a giant pile of people's stuff. And some of it was obviously trash. They were abandoning clothes after they changed from crossing and stuff like that. But a lot of it was full backpacks, a lot of ID documents just in piles, just piles of them. Yeah, yeah, just big piles of documents that proved who you were. The other thing we found were ladders, tons of them. Apparently, someone built a gazebo out of them. The wall varies in design a bit along the border, depending on when and by whom

it was built. But the Trump design has a flat anti-climb plate at the top. I'll let Paul describe how that's going. It was literally like somebody went to the hardware store, bought two of the longest, or actually, sorry, three of the longest two by fours you could, put two of them beside each other and then just nailed steps up them so you know they were like 16 20 feet long and um which was enough to just climb over the wall like there weren't there weren't many places um actually because most of the wall had that anti-climb barrier at the top whereas when you didn't have the anti-climb barrier, you didn't actually have something to set it against. But once you put that on there, you could just lean the ladder

up against it. It's like self-defeating. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,

the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, música, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love.

Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes these expulsions are not as straightforward as a bus to nearest port of entry. CBP has carried out what are called lateral transfers by plane or bus, taking migrants to another location along the border, to towns like San Diego or El Paso, even if they entered in Arizona or California. This leaves families stranded in a town where they have no connections, no resources and no community. Again, these are people I've met. Again, these are people I've met. It won't have escaped the listener's attention that those planes and buses and other means of detention and transport are indeed congregate settings, but that doesn't seem to matter here.

Title 42 didn't stop people trying to come, in for asylum, or approaching a port of entry, people began crossing in more remote places, places without border walls or barriers, and with less frequent border patrols. In 2020, the Border Patrol found 247 dead bodies along the border. This is unlikely to represent the full human toll of border enforcement. Many deaths in the desert go unreported and undiscovered. But it gives some kind of point of comparison for the 2021 number after a year of Title 42. 546 people died that year. In 2022, third year of Title 42, 857 people died. None of those people were guilty of any crime other than wanting a better life. But under Title 42, they lost their lives

because the U.S. didn't give them a safe way to exercise their human right to claim asylum. One local advocate, Hamira Yousefi, from a group called PANA, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, explained what Title 42 had been like for her as an advocate for asylum seekers. When the pandemic hit, we saw that Title 42 heavily restricted those who were able to seek asylum in this country.

So while there was chaos happening and folks around the world who were trying to come to the United States for refuge, they were unable to do so. And what this resulted in is people taking an even more dangerous path, right, than before and going between the ports of entries in order to try to seek refuge. And so we have had hundreds of cases of individuals who have gotten themselves injured, We have had hundreds of cases of individuals who have gotten themselves injured, who the hospitals are calling us because they tried to cross and got injured. And we're trying to help them with getting some basic legal services and immediate shelter and those types of things.

Since Biden took office, Human Rights First says it's identified more than 13,000 incidents of kidnapping, torture, rape, or other violent attacks on people blocked or expelled to Mexico under Title 42. That's because it's easy for violence to follow people who have no resources and no community to protect them. It's for that reason that you won't always see faces in my photographs at the border, and that some of the names in this series have changed, or perhaps we're just using someone's first name. It's also for that reason that not everyone at the border always wants to talk.

But we do have some interviews coming up for you tomorrow. Here's a clip from a discussion about this, which I recorded at the border last week. I'm trying to get people's faces. And that's what everybody is doing, our own news. I can't speak to what they're doing. That's what I'm doing. I don't know about other people.

You should ask, you should, if you think someone's taking a photo of you, it's okay, I don't have a... I'm not taking a photo everywhere. Why? You know, I wish I could tell you. People who are subject to Title 42 expulsion are not given an opportunity

to contest their expulsion on the grounds they would face persecution in the country to which they would be expelled. There's a very limited exception to Title 42 for people who quote-unquote spontaneously inform CBP officers that they fear being tortured in the country to which they will be expelled. However, in order to receive an official screening by an asylum officer for exemption under that provision, the CBP officer must first determine that the claim is reasonably believable. From March 2020 through September 2021, just 272 people were granted the right to seek asylum under this exception. The use of Title 42 has been, despite the relative lack of outrage since the Biden administration took office, bipartisan. In 2021, a few weeks before Biden's inauguration,

I spent some time talking to migrants at the southern border for Slate. Many of them had come to a small, tense city that had popped up just feet from the pedestrian border crossing, and the country that they had travelled thousands of miles to get to, but that they couldn't reach. You can see America through the fence there, but you can't get there. The camp was diverse in its composition. On one trip, I interviewed folks from Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia.

Here's what one of them said to me when he asked for his message to President Biden. You recognize his voice is Daniel's. That's because I don't have his permission to use his voice here. We are appealing to President Biden. We aren't bad people. Our goal is to work and get ahead in the world for our children. We don't want to go back. They will kill us. So we are here. Some of them wore Biden t-shirts, which I suspect were actually a plant by a right-wing agent provocateur looking to make the new administration look weak. They didn't really have bothered with all the effort. Biden would do plenty in the next few months to make himself look cruel and unkind. Before we talk about that, I want to play you a clip from Biden's

first press conference as president. You just listed the reasons that people are coming, talking about in-country problems, saying that it happens every year. You blamed the last administration. Sir, I just got back last night from a reporting trip to the border where i met nine-year-old jose who walked here from honduras by himself along with another little boy he had that phone number on him and we were able to call his family his mother says that she sent her son to this country because she believes that you are not deporting unaccompanied minors like her son that's why she sent him alone from Honduras. So, sir, you blame the last administration,

but is your messaging in saying that these children are and will be allowed to stay in this country and work their way through this process encouraging families like Jose's to come? Well, look. Look. The idea that I'm going to say, which I would never do, that if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we're just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side.

No previous administration did that either, except Trump. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. That's why I've asked the Vice President of the United States yesterday to be the lead person on dealing with focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador in the first place. In the coming months, some of which I covered for an op-ed in NBC about the Biden administration's cruel treatment of Haitian migrants, things on the border didn't get any better. Biden deported more Haitian people in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a year. 895 people were deported in 2020, versus more than 1,200 people from January 20th to March 22nd, 2021.

While making declarations about showing compassion to migrants, the Biden administration packed Haitians onto crowded planes and buses and sent them back to Haiti in the middle of a pandemic. In March, the U.S. sent another pointed disinvitation to Haitians. The US embassy in Haiti tweeted a picture of President Joe Biden, looking off into the distance with a caption in both English and Haitian Creole. In Creole, it read, The translation above it was, I can say quite clearly, don't come over. I can say quite clearly, don't come over.

In July of that year, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a child of parents who fled from Cuba, said that Haitians and Cubans fleeing unrest in their countries will not find safety in the US, even if they have a credible claim for asylum and especially if they flee by sea. In doing so, he was echoing statements that the US broadcast from planes flying over Haiti following the devastating earthquake in 2010. Following these announcements, the US diverted resources that it could have used to help people from suffering in a country which had been destroyed by a natural disaster to stop them coming to this country. He was also overlooking that under both international and domestic law,

asylum seekers are entitled to make claims no matter how they enter the country. Here's what Mallorca said at his press conference. Allow me to be clear. If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States. Part of this hard line is because of a perceived crisis at the border. You don't have to go far on twitter.com before you run into people like Fox News' Bill Malugan. Yep, the tampon in the coffee guy is now a border reporter. And he's shamelessly repeating CBP statistics about apprehensions on the southern border. Here he is talking to his buddy Tucker Carlson.

Do you remember that guy? Bill Malugan has covered the border more closely than any reporter in the United States for the last two years. And today, in his estimation, the single largest caravan of illegal aliens flowing into this country in his two years of watching crossed today. He broke the story. He's got remarkable video for us. He's live at the border now. Bill, great to see you. What did you see? Tucker, good evening to you. You mentioned it right off the top. This was easily the biggest group we have ever seen during our 19 months of covering this border crisis. And they all crossed illegally into El Paso last night.

And we got some pretty wild camera footage to show you. Take a look at this. This was last night in El Paso. A massive caravan of over 1,000 illegal immigrants crossing into El Paso last night. Local media there reporting it was potentially up to two thousand people and that it was possibly the biggest mass crossing in the city's history. Now as you look at the video you'll see just wave after wave after wave of these people walking across the river and then gathering on the US side of the river where they kind of form a single file line. But it's not just Fox News doing this. You'll see NPR and other more liberal

outlets quoting these same statistics without the necessary context. They're not lying. Apprehensions are higher. But that is in some part because migrants are now crossing more than once. In 2019, before Title 42 went into effect, just 7% of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol had previously been apprehended. The reapprehension rate grew to 27% in fiscal year 2022. This is because we're expelling people to places where they have no hope of a better future, and not leaving them with many options other than to try again in more remote and risky settings. in more remote and risky settings. Meanwhile, there's much less concern from the right and from Democrats at the fact that Ukrainians are exempted from Title 42. And Russians and Ukrainians generally experience expedited processing of the sort which one would hope this country could offer

to other people escaping conflicts around the world, including many that we started. I asked my friend Gustavo Solis, a border investigative reporter at KPBS in San Diego, to summarize the Biden administration's take on Title 42. On paper, the rationale is there's a pandemic going on. We need to stop or slow the spread of COVID-19. So because of this extraordinary circumstance, we need Title 42 to shore up the border. That was bullshit.

And we know that now through reporting that it was total bullshit. We know that from as early as 2018, Stephen Miller, Trump's White House aide, wanted to use Title 42 to stop this type of migration. We know that Vice President Mike Pence pressured the top doctors at the CDC into doing this, basically saying, if you don't do this, you might lose your job. Because even then, in March 2020, doctors at the CDC knew that there was no real public health rationale for this. I mean, if you look at the order, it's supposed to stop COVID, but there weren't any exceptions for migrants who were vaccinated, or there was no testing component to it. So that's kind of the beginning of Title 42. By the time Biden came in office, Biden had promised to end it along with remand in Mexico and restore the humane asylum

system. But he kept Title 42 in place and he didn't just keep it in place. He expanded it to include nationalities that weren't included when Trump first rolled it out. Even as the legal battle went back and forth, another major bottleneck emerged in the migration system. In the form of never-ending clusterfuck that is the CBP1 app. Again, I'll let Gustavo explain his reporting here. It actually kind of started with the Ukrainians. That was kind of how they started using it for the asylum context. But CBP1 is essentially a phone app for asylum.

And on paper, it kind of makes sense, right? Instead of like, you know, Joe Biden and the Dems are really terrified of the optics of a lot of people at the border. And a lot of their policy is revolved around stopping that, right? They don't want masses of people at the border. The CBP One app aims to address that by telling migrants, hey, instead of coming all the way to Mexico and showing up at the border, just download this app and schedule an appointment to come here and we'll vet you to see if you're eligible for asylum or not. Another example of a policy in Washington, D.C. that has like no reality in what's going on the

border because migrants live in shelters with really bad Wi-Fi access and they have crappy phones. So what I found in the reporting is that CBP1 rewards people with the best phones, not necessarily people who are most vulnerable. And the story I came out with last week was about how data from the Mexican government shows that at least in Tijuana, about 44% of every migrant who has gotten a CBP-1 application to enter the country is a Russian national. And Russian nationals make up at most 10% of the overall migrant population in Tijuana. So you have this situation where a relatively affluent 10% of the population is getting almost half of these humanitarian protection appointments that are designed for the world's most vulnerable people. And that's what CPAP1 does. They call it the ticket master of asylum, and that's not a

compliment. That is like, ticket master fucking sucks. Nobody likes it. I also spoke to Kaba, an activist who participated in mutual aid at the border. We talked about the app because Kaba has some professional insight into the technologies used. I do data science and machine learning related things for a living. And the problem of building these systems trained entirely on databases of white faces and then them not working for people of other ethnic backgrounds is very well known in this field. That is a very well documented issue for more than a decade. And anyone who could tell you that building a facial recognition or some kind of a camera app that does image processing and only training it on light faces, this is not something that I think any competent software development house would have done and not expected. So I have a hard time believing that the whole chain of everyone's had to go through from the developers on up to, you know, anyone who does IT or, you know, has authority over these things at CBP or at Homeland Security.

This is just it's like, I don't know, it's it's it's it's it's hard to believe that this was an accident. Anyway, before we get too far from discussing things that fucking suck, here's an advertising break. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations

with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio

app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You might be wondering why Title 42 is ending now, and how we got here, given that there seems

to be a consensus in DC that the border is in crisis, and that that crisis is not that people were leaving to die on the streets on the other side, or in the deserts of California and Arizona, but that people were allowing to come to the richest country that's ever existed, from countries that we've destabilised for decades, to have a chance at a decent life. Well, the answer is complicated. Some of it's a bit too complicated for me to really spend the time explaining, and you don't really need to know the ins and outs of court cases to understand that. Essentially, the Biden

administration had planned to end Title 42 in late 2022, right after the midterms. Title 42 actually became theoretically unenforceable in November of that year, thanks to a court ruling, but the Supreme Court in December prevented the Biden administration from amending Title 42, while the justices conceded a request by a group of Republican-led states that want to continue the expulsions, which had previously been declared unlawful by a lower court. Biden's Department of Justice had previously defended Title 42 as necessary to public health, but by the end of 2022, they were ready to end enforcement of Title 42 politically, even if they were nowhere near prepared on the ground. A coalition of Republican-led states, however, managed to get a federal judge in Louisiana to prevent officials from ending Title 42,

saying the Biden administration had not taken adequate steps required to terminate the policy. Then, on November 15th, another federal judge declared Title 42 unlawful, saying the CDC had not properly explained the policy's public health rationale or considered its impact on asylum seekers. At the request of the Biden administration, the judge gave border officials five weeks until December 21st to end Title 42. Nineteen Republican-led states asked several courts to delay Title 42's rescission indefinitely, warning that chaos would otherwise ensue. After their request was denied by lower courts, the states asked the Supreme Court to intervene. On December 27th, the Supreme Court said it would suspend the lower court order that found Title 42 to be illegal until it decided whether the Republican-led states should be

allowed to intervene in the case. That's some Christmas spirit for you. Eventually, with the end of the federal emergency over COVID-19, Title 42 just kind of went away. Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency which put up the most staunch resistance to vaccine mandates, would begin processing migrants under Title 8 of US immigration law on the 11th of May 2023. I'll let them summarise what they see this to mean. According to the USCIS website, individuals who unlawfully cross the southwest border will generally be processed under Title VIII expedited removal authorities in a matter of days. They will be barred from re-entry to the United States for at least five years if ordered removed and they will be presumed ineligible for asylum under the proposed circumvention of lawful pathways regulation absent an applicable exception. What this means is if you cross into the United States not at the

port of entry you will be assumed ineligible for asylum and the process to remove you from the United States will begin immediately you have a chance to file a defensive asylum claim against that but the process can be rushed and more difficult despite this and having almost three years to repair they were by no means ready let's hear from gustavo again gustavo can you explain to us a little bit about what you found that the Biden administration has been planning for the end of Title 42? Yeah, what I found is they haven't really been doing much planning. Right. I mean, they talk about I think with Title 42, it's a clear example of immigration policy being decided in Washington and no one really from the border being involved or told what's going on. So like I think it was last week, DHS Secretary Mayorkas did this press release

about what they're doing in terms of processing centers in Guatemala and Colombia so people can just go there instead of coming all the way to the border, which actually there haven't been timelines of when those will open. But they announced all these things for like big picture things, right? To stop people from coming in the first place, expanding some legal pathways, like making it easier for people with families

already here to get sponsors, fixing some of the little things with CBP1. But they don't talk about like on the ground logistics, right? So for example, I went to Tijuana to talk to the head of the Department of Migrant Affairs there, who told me in this, and I checked with him yesterday morning, who said, still to this day, less than 48 hours before Title 42 ends, he doesn't know how many migrants CBP will allow to cross through the ports of entry in San Isidro. His guess is that maybe 200, because that's kind of the number that they floated around in December when they originally wanted to get

rid of Title 42 before the lawsuit. And if it's 200, he basically said tijuana's gonna be screwed because 200 doesn't even cover the number of new migrants coming in and deportees being sent to tijuana so it's gonna like we have this bottleneck of migration in tijuana and all over the border because of title 42 for the last three years no one's been able to move and if they just open it up to 200 people that's not really going to address any of the bottleneck right there's like i think is it 16 000 people are waiting like an asylum application right now yeah yeah i hear different numbers thrown around like 10 000 15 16 and nobody really knows because there's like a network of official shelters and there's a bunch of unofficial shelters

and there's a bunch of russian dudes staying in's a bunch of Russian dudes staying in hotels and Airbnbs. But I think, yeah, tens of thousands. I think 16 is an accurate number. I think it's instructive here to listen to the Fox News coverage of this and how much Secretary Mayorkas tries to pander to them. I want to be very clear. Our borders are not open. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says when Title 42 expires at midnight tonight,

anyone who arrives at the southern border will be presumed ineligible for asylum and face consequences. But with holding facilities already overwhelmed, the administration is ratcheting up tough rhetoric while also clearing the way for mass releases into U.S. communities with no way for authorities to track people. You said at the beginning that you've prepared for this moment for almost two years. So why is part of that plan an honor system? Oh, it is not an honor system. They are a subject of our apprehension efforts. But under parole release authorized by the U.S. Border Patrol chief last night,

migrants do not receive an alien registration number for authorities to track them. They don't even get a court date. Instead, migrants are asked to turn themselves into ice within 60 days to start immigration proceedings on themselves. The American people are watching this. They know what they see. They see a wide open border. Florida's attorney general is suing the administration, arguing the parole plan is identical to a policy a federal judge struck down earlier this year. We have confidence in the lawfulness of our actions.

Plans to release migrants at bus stops, gas stations and supermarkets was first detailed last year, according to a memo uncovered by the Florida legal proceedings. Today, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a busload of migrants to the vice president's residence. Abbott sent a busload of migrants to the vice president's residence. Greg Abbott's disgusting antics aside, there was a real attempt by the Biden administration to come to the Republican side on migration that we can see clearly here. In the hours before we expected Title 42 to die, folks like me who cover the border made plans. The day before, on the 10th, Mayorkas announced that Title 42 would be enforced up until 11.59pm Eastern Time. And in San Diego, Border Patrol officers closed down the port of entry at San Isidro, the border town just south of San Diego, for a training exercise in which they lined up in front of the cars waiting to cross the border with plexiglass shields and riot gear.

cars waiting to cross the border with plexiglass shields and riot gear. Meanwhile, in between the two 30-foot border fences that divide San Isidro from Tijuana, Border Patrol began corralling migrants. Afghans, Colombians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Angolans, Sudanese, Tajiks and Congolese people all shared little more than a few tarps and cardboard boxes for shelter, as they waited for something to happen. Despite having months to prepare and years to plan, it appears the Department of Homeland Security totally failed to create so much as a scrap of shade or shelter, and instead chose to house people detained pending processing in the open air. In tomorrow's episode, we'll hear from some of them.

processing in the open air. In tomorrow's episode, we'll hear from some of them. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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