With U.S. intelligence officials estimating a massive increase in the number of illegal immigrants inundating illegal entry points at the southern border, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington said many who have been temporarily held off in Mexico will flood the border after Title 42 ends.
“Now you have Title 42 people coming in, who are just saying, ‘I’m coming to wait for the magic day,’” Bensman, senior national security fellow at CIS, told EpochTV’s “Facts Matter.”
Title 42 is a federal health statute that allows the government to impose health control measures to limit the number of people seeking asylum from entering the country during a health emergency. It’s slated to end on May 23.
During the Trump presidency, “everybody [who] gets caught crossing the border goes back immediately to Mexico. That drove the numbers down to kind of historic low levels,” Bensman said.
He said that although Biden was forced to keep Title 42, he carved out “huge exemptions in it for family groups and unaccompanied minors, that … created the mass migration crisis that we have today.”
With the Biden carve-outs, record numbers of illegal immigrants are entering the United States, but intelligence officials are predicting that after Title 42 is lifted, between 12,000 and 18,000 illegal immigrants will flood the southern border each day.
“That’s on the outer limits of the estimates, [which] are coming from the American intelligence community. … This is what they’re expecting,” Bensman said. “They’re saying it could be as low as 12,000 a day. But to give you some context, we’re at [6,000] and 7,000 a day right now, which is just too big to handle at present.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency in March to support Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers over the following three months to help process families and children who enter illegally more quickly.
“They’re bringing in fleets of aircraft to be able to quickly move people off the riverbanks into other places, other cities, other towns. They’re doing expansions of existing facilities, like kind of soft-sided tent-like facilities. They’re probably going to be bringing in the army to help with crowd control. And they’re working closely with the Mexicans to see if the Mexicans can control things on their side,” Bensman said.
their side,” Bensman said.