Fear in the United States due to a migration crisis: thousands of people at the border are waiting to enter

The stage is so tense that any accident can throw everything into a tailspin. There are tens of thousands of people on the Mexican borderready to enter the United States without documents in the next few hours.

Entire families live in makeshift tents on the streets or sleep on the floor of churches, fleeing the crises in their countries. The president of the United States himself, Joe Biden admitted it the situation will be “chaotic for a while”, but he fears it is more serious and that is why he has sent more than 1,500 soldiers to the border. But behind it all there is a tightening of immigration policy and a possible humanitarian drama.

The crisis arises before a deadlineTitle 42 expires one minute before midnight this Thursday, the provision introduced by former President Donald Trump in 2020 which allowed the immediate expulsion of migrants who arrived without documents in times of pandemic and for which most of them were expelled those who entered through the Mexican border without having to accept their asylum applications.

The Biden administration is under strong pressure from the Republican Party, which is calling for tough measures against migration and also, like Trump, the erection of a wall thousands of kilometers long. Some members of the opposition party expect one million people to arrive at the border in the next three months.

Hundreds of thousands

But it is already estimated that there are around 150,000 people ready to enter. Others have already crossed the border and are waiting in makeshift tents in cities like El Paso.

Eighteen months before the presidential election, and with immigration still a contentious issue, Biden rolled out new rules to replace Title 42, which he hopes it helps stem the flow at the border and also sent an additional 1,500 soldiers for administrative duties, adding to the hundreds of Texan soldiers Governor Greg Abbott sent to “help intercept and push back” the migrants.

The possibility that the flow of migrants will skyrocket, many of whom live in conditions of poverty and victims of violence or corruption, has led President Biden to adopt new rules, with rewards for those who use them but that the associations that defend migrants they consider insufficient , defective and unchanged from that of Trump.

Even if I promised “a more humane immigration policy”The last thing a Democrat wants, in the middle of an election campaign, is to be accused of letting the border be a sieve.

“The border will not be open,” a US official said on a call with reporters, but “harsh consequences” will be imposed on those who attempt to enter the United States illegally.

They added that in total they were temporarily sent to the border “more than 4,000 people” to strengthen operations and “all our asylum officials have been retrained so that they are ready and available for the interviews that will be necessary for the accelerated repatriation that we will start carrying out from Thursday”.

“We will treat the migrants we find at the border with an accelerated repatriation”, the officials insisted, explaining that citizens of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti who do not have a legal basis “will be repatriated to Mexico with a repatriation order”.

Biden’s plan contemplates a moot point that is the prohibition for migrants to seek asylum when they have not used “legal avenues” to enter the country, although an exception is made for those who have “a reasonable fear of persecution or torture in the country of expulsion”.

The government has also announced it they will launch an application to expedite procedures and will open approximately 100 service centers in various countries of the hemisphere so that they can begin dealing with these possible “legal channels” outside the United States.

Criticism of Biden

Migration experts are not satisfied. “President Biden has clearly failed to deliver on his campaign promises that promised fair and dignified treatment for migrants and an end to policies that block access to asylum seekers,” he said clarion Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic and professor of law at the University of Texas.

“The new probation programs that Biden has put in place are insufficient and defective. They don’t apply to everyone in need of protection (for example Salvadorans or Hondurans), they are limited in number and there are serious problems with the application process,” she added.

Although the expert believes that Title 42, which is about to expire, is “a disastrous program that violated international human rights law and US regulations and put many migrants in extreme danger”, he doesn’t think Biden’s new policy will make things better.

“Unfortunately, instead of sending health and human services personnel to the border to receive migrants, the Biden administration has insisted on go back to the same old measurements trying to stop border arrivals that have failed in the past such as the expanded use of detention and fast-track procedures that return migrants to their home countries without even seeing an immigration judge.

Hours go by and tension at the border grows: with a “deterrent” objective, Border Patrol agents plan to carry out a special operation to detain migrants in El Paso, Texas, where hundreds of people have been sleeping on the streets for days. to identify those who have not been prosecuted and deport those who are not eligible to apply for stay in the country.

Biden officials explained that the target is for immigrants crossing the border illegally face “stronger consequences compared to those envisaged by Title 42″.