When Title 42 ends on Thursday of this week, agents from the Border Patrol will set free many immigrants from their custody, according to two senior officials from the agency who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon.
They say that this will be done as soon as the policy comes to a conclusion because authorities at the southern border need relief because holding facilities for immigrants are reaching their maximum capacity.
Requirements are typically in place for check-ins and tracking mechanisms that are given to migrants who are released while they await hearings for asylum. It’s not clear at this point whether the new revised policy has mechanisms that will ensure that the migrants comply with any future summons based on asylum hearings.
Many experts believe that as many as 14,000 migrants every single day could try to enter America in the first few weeks after Title 42 is terminated. That was a public health rule put in place under former President Donald Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic that enabled law enforcement agencies to deport aliens quickly.
Democrats have long been against the policy, but high-ranking members of the Biden administration have been privately concerned about the effect of it ending. For instance, the Free Beacon reported that Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, has said that once Title 42 ends, it will “strain our workforce, our communities and our entire system.”
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden himself even said that the southern border with Mexico would be “chaotic for a while.”
The new policy that will replace Title 42 is called “Released on Own Recognizance,” or OR. This differs from the normal protocol that’s in place, since migrants aren’t required to check in with any immigration authorities before they’re provided with a date in court.
The check-ins could allow law enforcement to know where the aliens are located should they decide to not comply with the orders of their release. That being said, deportations under the Biden administration have already plummeted, so it’s unlikely they were looking to ramp them up.
Still, the two senior officials with Border Patrol told the Free Beacon that the changes raise some pretty serious concerns about security and contradict other assertions the White House has made about the federal government being well-prepared for Title 42 to end.
Border Patrol agents all along the border are overwhelmed already, and don’t believe they’ll have sufficient manpower to do simple things such as provide appearance notices to aliens.
As one senior official with Border Patrol whose station is near the southwestern border said:
“We will be starting to cut them free right from the station after Title 42 ends. We’re told they will receive a court date, but some border sectors already have holding facilities at over 200% capacity. So, who knows what will happen?”
The decision to issue this order, according to the two officials, was made on Tuesday – the same day that 11,000 migrants were apprehended trying to illegally cross into the U.S. That marked the highest total ever recorded in a single day.
