Washington, May 14 (EFE).- Crossings of undocumented migrants on the United States border with Mexico have fallen by 50% after the lifting of Title 42, the expulsion policy in force during the covid-19 pandemic, he said this Sunday the secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
“We have been preparing for this transition for months and months, and we have consistently executed our plan,” said the head of immigration policy in an interview with ABC.
After the end of the health emergency last Thursday night, the United States stopped applying Title 42, which allowed undocumented migrants to be expelled without the possibility of requesting asylum under the pretext of the pandemic, but established other restrictions at the border. and began deporting through another regulation known as Title 8.
At the beginning of the week, the authorities arrested some 11,000 migrants daily, but after the implementation of the new immigration measures the numbers fell to 6,200 arrests on Friday and 4,400 on Saturday.
“The United States Border Patrol has seen a drop of approximately 50% in the number of people apprehended at our southern border compared to the numbers from earlier in the week before Title 42 ended,” Mayorkas said.
The official recalled that from now on all those people who cross the border without an immigration permit or without having requested asylum in the countries through which they passed will be deported quickly and, if they reoffend, they will be prohibited from entering the United States for five years.
“In fact, we have already expelled thousands of people who arrived at our southern border. We are enforcing our immigration laws under Title 8,” he stated.
Despite the new restrictions, Mayorkas denied that the immigration policy of the president, Joe Biden, resembles that of his predecessor, Donald Trump (2017-2021), as he said that the current government has implemented “the greatest expansion” of routes legal to immigrate to the United States in history.
The secretary said that the Government has a “humanitarian obligation” to respond to asylum requests, but also the “responsibility” to combat the networks of people traffickers who charge money from migrants to sneak them across the border.
Mayorkas also stated that the government will appeal the ruling of a Florida judge who struck down on Thursday a policy that allowed some migrants to be released from overcrowded detention centers even though they did not yet have a date to appear before the immigration court.
“We are obliged to comply with the ruling. We respect him but we do not agree with the judge. We believe that it is a very harmful norm”, said the secretary, who affirmed that all the Administrations have released migrants when the centers were saturated.
The post El Paso, a safe city beyond the racist ghosts fanned by the extreme right appeared first on Hola News.
