Biden announced an expanded parole program along with Title 42 removals.
Some Democratic lawmakers and immigrant activist groups are reacting with concern to President Biden’s announcement Thursday of new border security measures — particularly the expansion of Title 42 expulsions to include three additional nationalities – calling the moves “deeply” disappointing.
Biden, in a speech from the White House on Thursday, announced an expansion of a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelan nationals to include Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans. That program will allow 30,000 individuals a month from all four counties to be paroled into the U.S. for a two-year period as long as they have a financial sponsor and pass other conditions. Those who attempt to enter illegally are made ineligible for the program.
However, it is also accompanied by an agreement with Mexico that they will take 30,000 nationals from each country via expulsions under the Title 42 public health order. Should that order end, the expulsions will take place under the usual Title 8 removals.
Additionally, the administration announced a proposed rule that would make illegal immigrants ineligible for asylum if they “circumvent available, established pathways to lawful migration” and do not claim asylum in a country through which they traveled to get to the U.S.
BIDEN ANNOUNCES BORDER VISIT, NEW MEASURES AS PRESSURE GROWS OVER OVERWHELMING MIGRANT SURGE
Biden, as well as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, said the moves were an important step towards dealing with the ongoing crisis at the southern border — which saw more than 2.3 million migrant encounters in FY 2022, and numbers in FY 2023 that have so far outpaced those of the prior fiscal year.
“These actions alone that I’m going to announce today aren’t going to fix our entire immigration system but they can help us a good deal in managing what is a difficult challenge,” Biden said.
While the moves took heat from critics on the right for being too little too late amid a border crisis they put down to the administration’s own policies, it also received criticism from those typically more sympathetic to the administration’s stance on migration.
While those on the left of the immigration debate welcomed the expanded legal pathways, multiple senators and immigration groups expressed anger and disappointment at the move to lean more heavily into the Trump-era Title 42 order.
“While we understand the challenges the nation is facing at the Southern border exacerbated by Republican obstruction to modernizing our immigration system, we are deeply disappointed by the Biden administration’s decision to expand the use of Title 42,” Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., said in a joint statement.

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