12 hours before the expiration of Title 42, a milestone that will mark a new era in U.S. immigration policy on Friday, thousands of people waited Thursday morning in makeshift camps along the border for the best time to try to cross it. Their plans are divided between those who plan to surrender to the authorities or pass irregularly through one of the gaps left by the high fences of up to eight meters that separate the southern states with Mexico. Far from those dusty camps, an all-out political battle is being waged in Washington and at the state level on one of the issues that will define the 2024 presidential campaign and that is recklessly stoked by hawks from the hardest wing of the Republican Party. These paint an apocalyptic picture of "open borders", which invite an "invasion".
A group of migrants crosses the Rio Grande. ALFREDO ESTRELLA (AFP)
On the ground, in the cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, the reality, although dramatic, is very different and is dominated by uncertainty about what lies ahead. It is one of the hot spots of the 3,200-kilometer divide, where communities on both sides hold their breath at what may happen from Friday. The imminence of the end of Title 42 has already had its consequences: from the 6,000 people who were intercepted daily a week ago throughout the border, 8,000 were passed in recent days. On Wednesday, 10,400 people tried before it's too late. U.S. authorities estimate there are about 150,000 people in Mexico waiting to cross the border.
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On Wednesday, the secretary of Homeland Security advanced in a press conference that "the coming days and weeks could be very difficult." He also recalled that the Biden Administration has reinforced the authorities on the ground (more than 24,000 agents in total along the 3,200-kilometer line) and repeated a recurring message of recent weeks: "The border is not open." And neither will it be from Friday.
The new reality
Title 42 is a sanitary norm that Donald Trump dusted off from a law of the forties. It allows the hot return of migrants who arrived at the border seeking asylum under the pretext of stopping the advance of the pandemic. It has been in force for 40 months and has resulted in 2.6 million expulsions.
A line of migrants waits in Yuma, Arizona, on Wednesday. MARIO TAMA (Getty Images via AFP)
When it expires at the end of this Thursday, Washington time, the old Title 8, which allowed the Obama Administration to deport more than three million migrants in eight years, will go into effect. It will do so with news: those who want to request asylum are forced to request it through a mobile application from any of the countries of their journey. If they arrive in the United States without having met that requirement, they will be deported. Such deportation carries a ban on trying again for at least five years. If they are caught trying to cross again in that time, they risk prison sentences in the United States.
There are four countries with which the United States does not maintain diplomatic relations, whose nationals will not be returned to their places of origin. These are Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti. Two planes bound for Guatemala and Honduras left the El Paso airport on Wednesday. They are the last of Title 42 from this corner of the border.
If the asylum claim is accepted, the lucky ones can be taken to a detention center while it is being resolved, or receive an appointment with a judge somewhere in the United States. That quote is written on a document that will allow them to travel freely around the country. The deadlines are very different, from several weeks to several years. Currently, there are two million open cases, and the magistrates specialized in immigration issues are overwhelmed.
Joe Biden's expectations for re-election to the White House depend very much on the success of this transition. The border has become one of the issues of greatest concern among Americans, and the Republican Party is not afraid to overdo it when it comes to using those fears for its own electoral benefit.
Conservatives were Thursday, just hours before the end of Title 42, ready to pass their own border proposal. They have a majority in the House of Representatives, but not in the Senate, so the bill has very little chance of getting through. If it did, Biden would veto it.
Migrants show their documents to the Border Patrol in San Diego. MIKE BLAKE (REUTERS)
The 213-page Border Security Act bill would provide, among other provisions, funding to restart construction of a border wall and improve monitoring technology along the southern and northern borders of the United States. It would also allocate millions of dollars to increase the number of Border Patrol agents, and institute changes that Republicans say will streamline the asylum process.
On the other hand, controversial independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who represents Arizona, a border state, has been gathering support for months for a law that would essentially give Biden a Title 42 that does not need to be linked to a health emergency. The senator, who will seek re-election next year and knows that the issue of immigration control will be one of the priorities of the campaign, has introduced a bill in the upper chamber with Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican legislator from North Carolina.
The law proposes to facilitate for two years the deportation of irregular immigrants "without the need for a hearing or review" of the cases. His critics have called it an "anabolized Title 42" because he wants to resume the expulsion of unaccompanied minors, a policy that Trump instituted, but that the Biden Administration changed as part of a plan to humanize immigration policy that has finally remained halfway. Sinema and Tillis' bill needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, under the archaic filibuster system. The initiative, however, has been gaining ground. A sizable bloc of Republicans back it. Also some moderate Democrats who see their re-election in danger if they do not harden their position. This is the case of Joe Manchin, from West Virginia.
"I think both parties have failed at this. And we're not ready. We should extend Title 42, that more doctors and court employees go to the border who can process those who arrive," Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, another of the battlegrounds in next year's presidential elections, said this week. Arizona's other senator, astronaut Mark Kelly, who supported Sinema's proposal months ago, has changed his mind. "You have to look for other options. At the moment we must guarantee the necessary resources for what will happen after May 11," he said.
The political fray, however, reaches much further away from Washington. The reaction of the states on the border with Mexico has been diverse, and it has Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, the voice of the hardest sector against illegal immigration within the Republicans has presented a tactical force to reinforce surveillance in the area. His party is pushing through Congress a law that would make it a crime to enter Texas from Mexico.
Oblivious to all these fights that will decide their future, the last migrants of Title 42 spent Thursday morning on the other side from Ciudad Juárez. Hundreds of them had been waiting for days in front of gate 40 of the border wall. But people kept coming to the beach along the Rio Grande, protected since Tuesday with barbed wire and metal meshes. The last to arrive were invited to continue their pilgrimage a few kilometers to the east, to gate 42, where the last of Title 42 is concentrated.
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