Rules that have allowed US border guards to summarily expel hundreds of thousands of would-be asylum seekers over the last three years expired early on Friday, setting up an uncertain future for migrants and inflaming America’s always-churning immigration debate.
Tens of thousands of people were expected to try to cross into the United States over the coming days, hoping to escape the poverty and criminal gangs that wrack their own countries.
For more than three years the 3,200-kilometre frontier with Mexico has been regulated by Title 42, a health provision designed to keep Covid infections at bay by turning people away before they made a claim for asylum.
But with the formal ending of the Covid emergency, that rule expired at midnight East Coast time – with new restrictions taking its place.
Those new regulations require asylum-seekers and other migrants to request entry from outside the country.
But how things will play out remains unclear, and the situation has already roiled America’s heated immigration debate.
The administration of President Joe Biden is trying to walk a tightrope between offering the pathways to asylum demanded by members of his own Democratic Party, and avoiding the looped footage of hundreds of people pouring over the border.
“Starting tonight, people who arrive at the border without using a lawful pathway will be presumed ineligible for asylum,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said as Title 42 expired.
“We have 24,000 Border Patrol Agents and officers at the Southwest Border and have surged thousands of troops and contractors, and over a thousand asylum officers to help enforce our laws.”
Biden’s Republican Party opponents have seized on what they say is an “invasion”.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told reporters in Brownsville there were 22,000 people camping just on the other side of the frontier from this southernmost Texas city alone.
“And I have to say I am angry, because this is deliberate, this was a decision that was made by President Joe Biden and [Vice President] Kamala Harris and congressional Democrats to open up the border to what is nothing less than an invasion,” he said.
