The Biden government will end in May the regulations that allowed it to expel immigrants in hot

A family of Brazilian migrants walks along the US-Mexico border in June 2021. Eugene Garcia (AP)

President Joe Biden will end Title 42 at the end of May, a regulation adopted during the pandemic by his predecessor, Donald Trump, which facilitated the immediate expulsion of migrants at the border.

The mechanism became a tool for the Administration to quickly relieve the southern border, an area that registered a historic increase in illegal crossings, many of them by people seeking asylum.

Biden yields to pressure from human rights groups and an increasingly growing claim among his party colleagues, who asked him to raise an initiative considered a legacy of a xenophobic and anti-immigrant government.

The news has been advanced by

, which has revised the draft that ends the measure established in March 2020 and that has helped expel 1.7 million people quickly.

This Wednesday, Biden limited himself to telling the press that "soon" there would be a decision on the issue.

This, however, has been a rumor for weeks in Washington.

In the middle of this month, a group of Democratic senators had asked him to reconsider the role of a health regulation suggested by the Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

"We are disappointed in the Administration's decision to maintain Title 42... It is wrong that they continue to return families to their countries to be persecuted and tortured," complained high-profile senators such as Cory Booker, Bob Menendez,

The senators noted a contradiction.

While most states relaxed their health measures after the drop in coronavirus cases, the measure was still in force.

"We are perplexed that the CDC continues to use a draconian initiative at the border, which contradicts the recovery of the United States from the pandemic," they said in a statement.

Similar criticisms had been made by House Democrats.

“Title 42 was never about sanitation.

It was a way to keep people who were seeking asylum and protection away,” Latino Congressman Juan Vargas wrote on Twitter, recalling that the asylum application is a right contemplated in US law.

Thanks to Title 42, 107,000 migrants were expelled from the United States in March 2021. Most of these arrived from Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central America.

That was the first month in which 100,000 expulsions were exceeded, a mark surpassed in April, May, June and September of that year.

Migrants expelled under Title 42 are processed in a different way than other detainees at the border, so many of them tried to cross again days later.

Border enforcement authorities reported just over a million removals in fiscal year 2021 (September 2021 to last September) thanks to Title 42. This represents 60% of all encounters on the line.

The situation is not very different in 2022. 430,000 migrants have been returned between October 2021 and last February.

The area of ​​great migratory flow continues to be the border with Mexico.

Last month, 89,000 people who came through there were expelled.

On the border with Canada, on the other hand, there were 52.

Some legislators, especially from border states, have made public their concern about the end of the measure, which has served to contain the historic migratory flow that has arrived in Biden's first year.

“The only thing that is helping the Department of Homeland Security to control the border is Title 42 and Biden wants to end it at the worst possible time,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, who believes that the consequence will be a “Tsunami of drugs and migrants”.

The two Democratic senators from Arizona, astronaut Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, both Democrats, have also spoken out in support of the measure.

Migration will be one of the most repeated issues heading into the legislative elections in November, where the Republicans seek to wrest control of Congress from the Democrats.

Washington has begun to prepare the end of the normative controversy.

For a few days, the Administration has begun to vaccinate migrants who cross the border.

The border patrol assures that some 2,700 doses of the biological against the coronavirus can be administered.

The figure pales when one considers that the agents have arrested some 7,000 people daily in recent weeks.

In February there were 5,600, on average.

According to

, Homeland Security is also fitting out and expanding new border detention centers to process immigrants.

The White House recently announced that it is fine-tuning a plan to reduce wait times for asylum seekers.

This can be a substitute for Title 42, since it will allow immigration agents to be the first to qualify the eligibility of a migrant in their asylum claim.

The goal is to reduce the workload of immigration judges who are suffering from a backlog of 1.7 million cases to resolve, a situation that the pandemic has aggravated.

In June, the United States will host the Summit of the Americas, where migration objectives will be evaluated together with Canada and Mexico, the main expeller of migrants in the last year.

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