{"id":352914,"date":"2021-10-18T14:25:41","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T14:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=ba0f73341d4d1a59218c2537d021eacb"},"modified":"2021-10-18T14:25:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T14:25:41","slug":"biden-has-outpaced-trumps-use-of-title-42-to-expel-asylum-seekers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/10\/18\/biden-has-outpaced-trumps-use-of-title-42-to-expel-asylum-seekers\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden Has Outpaced Trump\u2019s Use of Title 42 to Expel Asylum Seekers"},"content":{"rendered":"\"People<\/a>

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know we were being deported,\u201d said Cinthia* as she walked toward a bus headed to Honduras. The 24-year-old fled violence and threats in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, earlier this year. She made it 1,500 miles north through Guatemala and Mexico and across the U.S. border into Texas, where she planned to request asylum. Instead, the U.S. summarily expelled her on a flight from McAllen, Texas, to southern Mexico, and Mexico then sent her overland to El Ceibo, a remote border crossing with Guatemala.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey never allowed me to say why I left,\u201d Cinthia said of U.S. border and immigration officials. \u201cThey just told us to get on.” Cinthia and other Hondurans expelled by the U.S. with whom Truthout <\/em>spoke as they walked over the border from Mexico into Guatemala said they were not told where they going until they landed in Villahermosa, Mexico, the Tabasco state capital. Some had heard rumors they were being flown to a shelter in another part of the U.S.<\/p>\n

In the past two months, more than 14,000 Central American migrants and asylum seekers have been expelled and deported over the El Ceibo border crossing, according to the Guatemalan Immigration Institute. More than 70 percent have been Honduran, as for the past month and a half, Guatemalans have been sent back over a different border crossing. Thousands were detained in different parts of Mexico and deported via El Ceibo. Thousands of others, including Cinthia, were subject to a sort of chain expulsion: summarily expelled by the U.S. on daily flights to southern Mexico and then bused by Mexico back to Central America.<\/p>\n

The expulsions through Mexico are the latest iteration of U.S. policies and practices blocking people from seeking asylum<\/a><\/span> that started under former President Donald Trump and have continued under President Joe Biden. Over the past three years, migrants and asylum seekers from northern Central America have been subject to diverse restrictions on asylum: expedited removals, summary expulsions, the “Remain in Mexico”<\/a><\/span> policy and a so-called “safe third country”<\/a><\/span> agreement with Guatemala. The expulsions through El Ceibo are carried out under Title 42, a public health order the U.S. has been using during the COVID-19 pandemic to summarily expel migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border.<\/p>\n

Trump’s administration invoked Title 42 last year, shortly after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Based on a seldom-used part of 1940s health legislation, Title 42 confers authority for emergency action to address health risks associated with entry into the country of people, regardless of citizenship. On March 20, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order<\/a><\/span> \u201csuspending the right to introduce certain persons where a quarantinable communicable disease exists.\u201d The order applies to entry overland from Mexico or Canada to people \u201cwho would otherwise be introduced into a congregate setting,\u201d and authorizes their expulsion either to the country they last transited — Mexico, in the vast majority of cases — or to their country of origin. U.S. citizens are exempt.<\/p>\n

In practice, the U.S. has been using the order to circumvent processing and screening, prevent asylum claims, and summarily expel migrants and would-be asylum seekers. There have been more than 1.1 million Title 42 expulsions, though some people have been expelled multiple times within that total. Migrant rights advocates had hoped the Biden administration would ditch the practice, but its use has only increased. In Biden\u2019s first seven full months in office, from February through August 2021, the U.S. Border Patrol registered<\/a><\/span> 690,209 Title 42 expulsions at the U.S. southern border — more than 1.8 times the number of expulsions in 10 months last year, from March through December 2020, under Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does seem like Biden\u2019s inner circle or administration is sticking to their guns on this,\u201d said Yael Schacher, senior U.S. advocate at Refugees International, a humanitarian and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. \u201cPersonally, I think it\u2019s because they don\u2019t quite have a plan for how to process people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rights groups challenged the legality of Title 42 expulsions in court, and in late September, a federal court judge sided with them. The judge issued an injunction against the government regarding the expulsion of families with children but did not put it into effect immediately, giving the Biden administration a grace period to appeal, which it has. Then on October 2, Harold Koh, a senior State Department adviser who had already planned to leave government, used his resignation to publicly condemn the administration for its treatment of thousands of Haitian migrants and asylum seekers, calling their expulsions under Title 42 illegal. The Biden administration stood its ground in court and in public statements responding to Koh.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve been consistently misportraying what Title 42 is,” Schacher told Truthout<\/em>. “[White House Press Secretary Jen] Psaki responded to Koh\u2019s legal rebuke of Title 42 by basically misrepresenting how many people pass through screening, saying these screenings were available, when in fact, they\u2019re not really available to most people.”<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of the focus has been on whether [the expulsions] are justified on health grounds, rather than, \u2018Where are we sending people?\u2019\u201d she said. With Haiti, that issue has been at the forefront, given the recent Temporary Protected Status designation<\/a><\/span>, massive earthquake and violent political turmoil. When the Trump administration implemented an asylum cooperation agreement with Guatemala, deporting Hondurans and Salvadorans to the country to seek asylum, there was significant U.S. attention and activism on the serious insecurity and dangers people were being sent back to, said Schacher. Thousands of Central Americans are being expelled to Guatemala now, though, and \u201cthat hasn\u2019t gotten much attention\u201d because of the overwhelming focus on the health grounds.<\/p>\n

Migrant advocacy and human rights groups throughout Guatemala and Mexico have been speaking out against Title 42 expulsions since they first began. International agencies have also condemned the phenomenon for violating international law<\/a><\/span>. In May, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), called on the U.S.<\/a><\/span> \u201cto swiftly lift the public health-related asylum restrictions that remain in effect at the border and to restore access to asylum for the people whose lives depend on it.\u201d The UN agency reiterated its appeal in August, in response to the expulsions to southern Mexico and overland into Guatemala.<\/p>\n