The Texas Border Coalition, made up of political and economic development leaders along the U.S.-Mexico border from Brownsville to El Paso, said Friday that the Biden administration’s lifting of Title 42 is an opportunity to modernize a failed U.S. immigration system.
Title 42 allows border officials to immediately turn away migrants and asylum seekers on public health grounds regardless of whether their reasons for seeking asylum are legitimate. The Trump administration deployed it as a means to keep asylum seekers and migrants from entering the United States from Mexico.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is lifting the emergency policy as of May 23 in light of “current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19.” The Department of Homeland Security said it is preparing to handle the thousands of additional migrants expected to show up at the border as a result.
TBC urged the administration and Congress to immediately “move beyond the nation’s long-standing ‘band-aid’ approach to immigration and border security” and modernize the immigration system.
Cameron County Judge and TBC Chairman Eddie Trevino Jr., in an April 7 letter to Biden, DHS, officials, congressional leaders and members of the Texas delegation, wrote that “border communities are among the safest in the country” and that treating the region like a political football in partisan battles sullies the region’s standing and its people.
Title 42 “was always band-aid and not a solution,” he said, adding that plans to address the anticipated influx of migrants after May 23 “are also short-term and will foster new problems.”
“It is time our leaders put aside the partisan bickering that can achieve no more than temporary, ineffective results and join together to solve the problem,” Trevino said. “This moment creates an opportunity for Congress to finally address the fundamental issues and legislate a solution built on the pillars of modernizing immigration and strengthening security,” he said.
Trevino wrote that TBC has always advocated for “smart, effective border security” but that national and state leaders have instead “resorted to piecemeal, incomplete tactics that, no matter how well intentioned, have not resolved the security issue.”
According to Trevino, the smart, effective solution includes more and better equipped Customs and Border Protection agents at the southern land ports-of-entry and border patrol agents between the ports; technological improvements at and between the ports for more effective and efficient border-security workforce; and retooling national immigration policy regarding DREAMERs and agricultural workers and expanding visa availability for the temporary workers vital to economic growth in the region and the nation.
“These initiatives have been debated in Congress for many years and we are grateful for the small steps that have been taken under Democratic and Republican presidents to advance them,” he said. “While bringing them a compromise the president can sign will be difficult, Americans will generously celebrate such an achievement.”
