The United States faces an influx of at least 150,000 immigrants when Trump-era Title 42 border controls expire on May 11th, with Joe Biden openly admitting that it’s “going to be chaotic”.
As bad as the situation on America’s southern border already is under the Biden-Harris administration, Title 42 expulsions authorized by Trump under the Public Health Services Act in 2020 have seen off some three million would-be border violators.
Law enforcement will be stripped of this valuable tool from Thursday, with President Biden – who would have taken away them away even faster if Republican-led states had not thwarted him in the courts – refusing to renew them.
Even he seems to admit the enormity of the crisis his actions are poised to unleash, telling the press: “It’s going to be chaotic for a while.”
Indeed, Axios reports “scene[s] of chaos and desperation” on both sides of the border already, with hundreds-strong migrant encampments strewn about the frontier and an estimated 150,000 people in Mexico ready to try and breach it.
Some officials have put the number of migrants waiting in Mexico’s streets and shelters for a chance to cross even higher, at around 700,000.
Further south, the President of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, has said another 80,000 mostly Venezuelan migrants are trekking through his country, according to Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who also claims the White House has not been taking the Guatemalan leader’s calls on the crisis.
“It’s going to be chaotic for a while.”
—Biden says even more chaos is coming to the southern border once Title 42 ends this week pic.twitter.com/POFMNzmIkn
— Chad Gilmartin (@ChadGilmartinCA) May 9, 2023
‘Castrophic’ Situation.
Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, accused President Biden of having effectively rolled out the red carpet for illegal immigrants, predicting a “catastrophic disaster”.
“I think that there is no question that this is going to be extremely challenging,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confessed while observing the situation at the Rio Grande last Friday, warning that he could not “understate the severity of the challenge that we expect to encounter.”
Kyrsten Sinema, a Senator for Arizona who walked away from the Democrats to sit as in independent at the end of 2022, has complained that the Biden administration “had two years to prepare for this” and failed to do so, meaning “migrants will be in crisis as soon as next week.”
“It will be a humanitarian crisis because we are not prepared,” she added.
Per NBC, “the number of undocumented immigrant crossings at the southwest border for fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking the previous annual record by more than 1 million, according to Customs and Border Protection data.”