Secretary Mayorkas provided an update on planning and operations ahead of the lifting of the Title 42 public health Order at a White House Press Briefing.
Thank you very much, Karine, and good afternoon.
Tonight at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time, the pandemic-era Title 42 public health Order will end. Starting at midnight, people who arrive at our Southern Border will be subject to our immigration enforcement authorities under Title 8 of the United States Code.
Here is what that means: If anyone arrives at our southern border after midnight tonight, they will be presumed ineligible for asylum and subject to steeper consequences for unlawful entry, including a minimum five-year ban on reentry and potential criminal prosecution.
The transition to Title 8 processing will be swift and immediate. We have surged 24,000 Border Patrol Agents and Officers, and thousands of troops, contractors, and over a thousand asylum officers and judges to see this through.
We are clear-eyed about the challenges we are likely to face in the days and weeks ahead, and we are ready to meet them.
We expected to see large numbers of encounters initially. We are already seeing high numbers of encounters in certain sectors.
This places an incredible strain on our personnel, our facilities, and our communities with whom we partner closely.
We prepared for this moment for almost two years and our plan will deliver results. It will take time for those results to be fully realized, and it is essential that we all take this into account.
Our current situation is the outcome of Congress leaving a broken, outdated immigration system in place for over two decades, despite unanimous agreement that we desperately need legislative reform. It is also the result of Congress’s decision not to provide us with the resources we need and that we requested.
Our efforts within the constraints of our broken immigration system are focused on ensuring that the process is safe, orderly, and humane, all while protecting our dedicated workforce and our communities.
I want to be very clear: Our borders are not open. People who cross our border unlawfully and without a legal basis to remain will be promptly processed and removed.
An individual who is removed under Title 8 is subject to at least a five-year ban on re-entry into the United States and can face criminal prosecution if they attempt to cross again.
Smugglers have been long hard at work spreading false information that the border will be open. They are lying.
To people who are thinking of making the journey to our southern border, know this: Smugglers care only about profits, not people. Do not risk your life and your life savings, only to be removed from the United States if and when you arrive here.
Our approach, to build lawful, safe, and orderly pathways for people to come to the United States, and to impose tougher consequences on those who choose not to use those pathways, works.
President Biden has led the largest expansion of lawful pathways in decades. People from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have arrived through lawfully available pathways, and we reduced border encounters from these groups by 90% between December of last year and March of this year.
We are launching new and expanded family reunification parole processes for nationals of Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Honduras, and are increasing use of the CBP One mobile app for individuals to schedule appointments at our ports of entry.
To those who do not use our available lawful pathways, we will deliver tougher consequences using our immigration law authorities.
The new rule finalized yesterday presumes that those who do not use lawful pathways to enter the United States are ineligible for asylum. It allows us, the United States, to remove individuals who do not establish a reasonable fear of persecution.
We announced that eligible families will be placed in Expedited Removal proceedings, and those that receive a final negative credible fear determination will generally be removed within 30 days of being placed in those proceedings.
We began planning in 2021 for the end of Title 42. Just a few highlights:
In addition to securing the first increase in Border Patrol Agent hiring in more than a decade, we are in the process of surging personnel to the border, including over 1,400 DHS personnel, 1,000 processing coordinators, and an additional 1,500 Department of Defense personnel.
We are delivering tougher consequences for unlawful entry. During the first half of this fiscal year, we returned, removed, and expelled more than 665,000 people. We are conducting dozens of removal flights each week, and we continue to increase them. Just yesterday, we worked with the Mexican government to expel nearly 1,000 Venezuelans who did not take advantage of our available lawful pathways to enter the United States.
We are bolstering the capacity of local governments and NGOs. Last week, we announced the distribution of an additional $332 million to support communities along the southern border and in the interior of our country.
And we are going after the smugglers, leading an unprecedented law enforcement disruption campaign that has led to the arrest of more than 10,000 smugglers who mislead and profit from vulnerable migrants.
The United States is also working closely with regional partners to impose stiffer consequences at our border, expand lawful pathways for orderly migration, and coordinate enforcement efforts.
This includes Mexico announcing, for the first time ever, that they will accept the returns under Title 8 authorities of nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela so that we can continue the parole processes that have been so successful in reducing migration from those countries.
It includes working with Colombia and Panama to launch a historic anti-smuggling campaign in the Darien to target criminal networks that prey on migrants.
And it includes dramatically scaling up the number of removal flights we can operate to countries throughout the hemisphere, including Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.
We are, we are a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. We are doing everything possible to enforce those laws in a safe, orderly, and humane way.
We are working with countries throughout the region, addressing a regional challenge with regional solutions.
We again, yet again, call on Congress to pass desperately needed immigration reform and deliver the resources, clear authorities, and modernized processes that we need.
Source: Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate