Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) is leading a group of GOP senators on a visit to the United States border with Mexico on Thursday, mere hours before Title 42 is formally ended and hundreds of thousands of migrants stream across the border beginning at midnight.
Marshall, who is leading the trip with Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ted Budd (R-NC), and John Hoeven (R-ND), told Breitbart News ahead of it that the surge of migrants expected upon the end of Title 42 is an unprecedented “historic border crisis” in the making.
“In the absence of any leadership from the White House to address this border crisis, Title 42 was the only tool in the toolkit that helped our overwhelmed and overworked Border Patrol agents,” Marshall said. “The Democrats had well over two years to prepare for a world without Title 42 – instead, they did nothing as this historic border crisis unraveled. They watched as millions crossed our borders, emboldening cartels to bring illicit drugs into our country, including lethal fentanyl that’s killing Americans across the country at an alarming rate. Today, I will lead a group of my Senate colleagues to the front lines of this crisis in Brownsville, Texas. We will hear firsthand from border personnel just how unprepared they feel for this moment, how they are bracing for impact.”
As Breitbart News has reported, as many as 700,000 migrants are waiting on the other side of the border to stream across as soon as Joe Biden formally lifts Title 42 authority on Thursday night at midnight.
Title 42 allowed border agents to quickly remove illegal aliens, in the interest of public health, back to their home countries. While the Biden administration, with the help of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, has accelerated to historic levels the number of migrants they are allowing into the country using justifications such as asylum, Title 42—which was enacted at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic by now former President Donald Trump’s administration—remained one of the only tools that law enforcement officials had to slow the influx of migrants at the border. There was bipartisan support for a long-term codification of Title 42 authority in Congress, too, but that effort did not pass the Democrat-controlled Congress last year—and the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate would not consider it this year.
Biden has undone basically every single border and immigration control that Trump had in place—and his administration has long sought to end the Title 42 authority. Now that Biden has finally agreed that the pandemic is over—he signed a measure admitting that recently—he has used that decision to justify undoing Title 42, thereby readying the United States for even higher levels of migration across the border.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are preparing to pass their own plan to stop the madness at the border, but again the measure, while expected to pass the House, will not be considered by Democrats who control the Senate nor by the White House. That sets 2024 up as a massive referendum election on migration policy, as Trump seeks to return to the White House and has made immigration policy a centerpiece of his campaign again, while Biden seeks a second term and has promised more of the same of what the country has seen in his time in office if reelected. Republicans also have a shot at retaking the U.S. Senate; if they do so in conjunction with winning the White House and holding their House majority, it could lead to reforms and policies being implemented that end or slow the surge across the border. But for now, with Biden in the White House and Democrats running the Senate, things do not appear to be heading for any kind of change unless and until the American people elect someone different.
