There have been complaints that the Biden administration doesn’t have a plan for how to deal with the inevitable surge of illegal immigration that will follow the lifting of the Title 42 public-health rule that allows the Border Patrol to expel border-jumpers without a hearing. Even some border-state Democrats have asked that Title 42 be kept in place until there’s a plan to deal with the consequences.
But there is a plan — you just have to connect the dots.
The fact sheet on “DHS Preparations for a Potential Increase in Migration” uses the words “processing” or “processed” ten times in a two-page document. The key section is under “Delivering a more efficient and fair immigration process,” and specifically the subheading “Issued rule to expedite asylum claims.” This new regulation, allowing low-level USCS bureaucrats at the border to grant asylum on the spot, in a “nonadversarial hearing,” combined with other administration actions that dramatically expand the grounds for asylum, are a recipe for rubber-stamping of asylum claims.
And the key is that the administration set the date for the end of Title 42 only a few days before this new asylum rule goes into effect.
What that means is that the White House plan for dealing with the surge of new illegal immigration — which will come on top of the existing historic surge of illegal immigration – is not to halt the surge but to launder it by granting asylum immediately to virtually all those who jump the border. The goal is to “process” hundreds of thousands of border jumpers in an “efficient and fair” manner so that they’re no longer illegal aliens. Once they’ve been re-christened as asylees (and thus on a path to citizenship), there are no more messy questions about whether they’ll show up for court and whether they’ll leave when they lose their asylum claim (as most currently do).
As I wrote at National Review this morning, “Today’s mainstream Left does not believe that the American people have the right to keep anyone out.”