The Biden administration is relying on a contested Trump-era policy - based on a public health law known as Title 42 - as it disperses thousands of Haitian migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Here's a look at the law and the controversy surrounding it.
Much to the dismay of migrant advocates, the Department of Homeland Security is invoking the public health law known as Title 42 to quickly take Haitians into custody and fly them back to their troubled homeland, denying them an opportunity to make a claim to stay in the U.S. by seeking asylum.
Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act gives federal health officials powers during a pandemic to take extraordinary measures to limit transmission of an infectious disease. It was ostensibly intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in cramped Border Patrol stations or in facilities run by Immigration and Customs and Enforcement. Critics of the policy see it as a thinly disguised measure to thwart immigration, noting it deprives people of the right to claim asylum or seek to remain in the U.S. through some other legal avenue.
“The Biden administration claims it wants to distance itself from the Trump administration’s inhumane asylum policies,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. “Yet it has retained the most extreme of all the policies, the Title 42 policy that is literally sending families into the hands of persecutors and cartels.”In recent days, thousands of migrants from Haiti have sought to enter the U.S. at the Del Rio border crossing.
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