Biden admin predicts new illegal immigrant ‘surge’ next month as pandemic’s border restrictions fade

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged Tuesday that the conditions along the southern border will deteriorate next month when the government’s Title 42 pandemic authority to immediately expel illegal border crossers disappears, but told a congressional hearing that his department is working to adapt to the changed conditions.

Mr. Mayorkas did not offer specific numbers on border traffic, but a projection last year, ahead of a previous deadline for ending Title 42, said that as many as 18,000 illegal immigrants could cross per day. 

That would be nearly triple the amount that arrived each day in March.

“We do anticipate a surge in the number of encounters,” Mr. Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Title 42 is the public health law invoked by the Trump administration at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — and retained by the Biden administration — that allows U.S. border agents to deny individuals entrance into the country in order to “prevent [the] spread of communicable disease.”

He said the department’s goal is to shift some of the illegal immigrants to new ways of entering. They would still be illegally present in the U.S., though they would not be sneaking in between the designated ports of entry.

Mr. Mayorkas said officials have had a test-run of that policy since early January, when they announced a program to “parole” migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua. Illegal crossings from those countries have dropped.

“We have indeed seen people avail themselves of the lawful pathway,” the secretary said.

But illegal crossings from other countries have picked up the slack, and new numbers released Monday, just ahead of Mr. Mayorkas’s testimony, show that overall unauthorized migrant entries in March neared 258,000.

Of those, roughly 162,000 were nabbed by Border Patrol agents at the southern border, about 1,000 were nabbed by agents at the northern border, 34,000 who came through border crossings on the northern and southern borders, and some 50,000 came through other entry points such as airports.