Interviewer / Reporter (58:00)
Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in AB town. You probably don't remember the passage of Title 42, let alone that of Title 42, Chapter 6A, Subchapter 2, Part G, Section 264. But it's the part of US federal law that gives the government the authority to take emergency action to keep communicable diseases out of the country. The portion which allows a sweeping disregard for asylum law passed in 1944 reads in one giant run on paragraph sentence as Whenever the Surgeon General determines that by reason of the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country, there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States, and that this danger is so increased by the introduction of persons or property from such country that a suspension of the right to introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of the public health. The Surgeon General, in accordance with regulations approved by the President, shall have the power to prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate in order to avert such danger and for such period of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose. Before President Donald Trump's administration used it on March 20, 2020, it had been used only in 1929 to keep ships from China and the Philippines from entering US ports during a meningitis outbreak. But in March of 2020, when you probably weren't paying much attention because the world was falling apart, or when I just returned from a work trip to Rwanda, where I was months before any precautions appeared in the usa, screened for a novel coronavirus. The Trump administration cited this public health law in instructions to the Department of Homeland Security on restrictions for migrants entering the United States. That very same day, the Centre for Disease Control Director, Robert R. Redfield, relied on this regulation to issue an order suspending the introduction into the United States of certain individuals who had been in quote, unquote, coronavirus impacted areas and quote, who would be introduced into a congregate setting at the port of entry or a border station. This includes individuals coming from Canada or Mexico who would normally be detained by CBP after arriving at the border, people including asylum seekers, unaccompanied children and people attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry. Citing the new CDC order, that same day, the Border Patrol began expelling individuals who arrive at the US Mexico border without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum. Reports indicate the CDC scientists expressed opposition to the invocation of Title 42, arguing that there was really no public health rationale to support it. Ever since then, public health experts outside the CDC have continued to agree, arguing that while international borders largely remain open to other travelers, there is no need to turn away refugees and expel them to their home countries or send them to Mexico. Despite this, DHS has been applying Title 42 to migrants for three years since then, and people have been turned away without getting a chance to plead their case for asylum 3 million times. Now. Trump is no longer president, but Title 42 has persisted. It's actually persisted for much longer under Biden's watch, two years and four months than it did under Trump. Ten months. But we'll get to that part later. First, let's look at what its bureaucratic wrinkle does when it's applied for three years across a land border spanning 3,145 kilometers. That's 1,954 miles for the Americans listening at a time when climate change, economic decline and state and non state violence are driving more and more people towards the USA's southern border in the hope of a better life. We're talking about Title 42 this week because it ended on May 11th. In a sense this marks an important change in immigration law, but in a sense it doesn't. Immigration was complicated and cruel for migrants and profitable for people on both sides of the border before March of 2020, and it's the same after Title 42 has gone. But nonetheless, Title 42 represented a distinct change in how asylum works in the US and especially when combined with other Trump policies that Biden has continued. A distinct change in how many people die when coming to this country to try and have a better chance at a safe future. By April of 2020, Title 42 expulsions at the border overtook the previous record for expulsions under the so called Migrant Protection Prot, which is better known as remain in Mexico that was set in August of 2019 under an agreement reached with the Mexican government. In late March of 2020, the Border Patrol began sending quote unquote back to Mexico. Most Mexican but also Guatemalan, Honduran and Salvadorian families and single adults encountered at the border. This group of nationalities remained unchanged until May of 2022, when the Biden administration came to an agreement with Mexico to accept, quote, unquote, thousands of Cubans and Nicaraguans sent from the United States to Mexico. But this doesn't really matter. You'll see that a lot in these episodes. Immigration law on the ground and immigration law in Washington D.C. are two very different things. There has been extensive documentation of individuals expelled to Mexico who do not fit within these nationalities, including Haitian asylum seekers, some of whom I've spoken to myself. People who are expelled are often driven by bus to the nearest port of entry, that's a land border crossing, and told to walk back to Mexico, often without their luggage and other belongings. I found that luggage and belongings, including ID cards, clothing and even little stuffed animals, all along the border. In the three years since Title 42 has been in place, I asked my friend Paul to describe what we found in Texas when we'd been for a walk along the border wall during our time reporting on the National Butterfly Center. There you'd find driver's licenses. I believe at one point we found like an almost an information packet for like it was for a teenager, a teenage girl. I remember that because we got pictures of it. And then when we took that long walk, remember we walked down the border wall. It was two, two and a half mile walk, something like that. When we got to the very end of the wall where the river was, there was just a giant pile of people's stuff and some of it was obviously trash. They were abandoning clothes after they changed from crossing and stuff like that. But a lot of it was full. Backpacks, a lot of ID documents just in piles. Just piles of them. Yeah, yeah, just big piles of documents that proved who you were. The other thing we found were ladders, tons of them. Apparently someone built a gazebo out of them. The wall varies in design a bit along the border depending on when and by whom it was built. But the Trump design has a flat anti climb plate at the top. I'll let Paul describe how that's going. It was literally like somebody went to the hardware store, bought two of the longest, or actually, sorry, three of the longest, two by fours. You could put two of them beside each other and then just nailed steps up them. So you know they were like 16, 20ft long and which was enough to just climb over the wall. Like there weren't, there weren't many places actually because most of the wall had that anti climb barrier at the top. Whereas when you didn't have the anti climb barrier you didn't actually have something to set it against. But once you put that on there, you could just lean the ladder up against it. It's like self defeating. Sometimes these expulsions are not as straightforward as a bus to nearest port of entry. CBP has carried out what are called lateral transfers by plane or bus, taking migrants to another location along the border to towns like San Diego or El Paso, even if they entered in Arizona or California. This leaves families stranded in a town where they have no connections, no resources and no community. Again, these are people I've met. It won't have escaped the listener's attention that those planes and buses and other means of detention and transport are indeed congregate settings. But that doesn't seem to matter here. Title 42 didn't stop people trying to come, but it made the journey more difficult. Instead of crossing and trying to turn themselves in for asylum or approaching a port of entry, people began crossing in more remote places, places without border walls or barriers and with less frequent border patrols. In 2020, the Border Patrol found 247 dead bodies along the border. This is unlikely to represent the full human toll of border enforcement. Many deaths in the desert go unreported and undiscovered. But it gives some kind of point of comparison for the 2021 number. After a year of Title 42, 546 people died that year. In 2022, third year of Title 42, 857 people died. None of those people were guilty of any crime other than wanting a better life. But under Title 42, they lost their lives because the US didn't give them a safe way to exercise their human right to claim asylum. One local advocate, Hermira Yousefi, from a group called pana, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, explained what Title 42 had been like for her as an advocate for asylum seekers.
