Republicans and Democrats are both strongly opposing a new set of border security measures that the Biden administration increased earlier this month and which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, are helping to reduce illegal border crossings, but for quite different reasons, Fox News informed.
The number of border crossings has increased significantly under President Biden’s watch, reaching a record 250,000 in December alone. He said earlier this month that the administration was taking a number of steps to curb these crossings.
More than 30,000 people can now fly directly into the United States each month if they have a sponsor in the United States, pass a background check, and did not enter the country illegally thanks to those measures, which also saw the expansion of a humanitarian parole program that had previously only been available to Venezuelans to now also include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans.
Along with that move, Title 42 expulsions were expanded to cover up to 30,000 people from those nations who entered the US unlawfully each month. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a regulation that would bar immigrants from requesting asylum if they had entered a nation without first requesting it.
The administration asserted this week that preliminary data shows the policies are effective, citing a 97% decrease in encounters involving those four nationalities. January is also on track to record the fewest border encounters since the crisis began in February 2021, according to the administration.
The right and left, however, have each separately criticized the carrot-and-stick strategy, claiming that it is unlawful for various reasons.
The U.N., some Democrats, and left-wing activist organizations all expressed outrage at the expansion of Title 42 and its asylum ineligibility provision for supposedly restricting the right to asylum.
According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the measures appear to be inconsistent with the ban on collective expulsion and the non-refoulment principle.
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