WASHINGTON (AP) – The ban on asylum-seekers at the U.S-Mexico border on public health grounds was imposed by a president who wanted to restrict immigration entirely. It will soon be ended by a president who is facing increasing pressure from within his own party to welcome immigrants.
The path ahead for President Joe Biden looks far from smooth. With the end of the ban on May 23, he faces an expected increase in migration at the border under a system incapable of managing such large migrant flows and buckling under a backlog of more than 1.7 million asylum cases.
Republicans are already eager to assign Biden blame for the expected images of thousands of people likely to be crammed into temporary border facilities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that it would lift the asylum ban, known as Title 42, next month. The ban had become increasingly hard to justify as pandemic restrictions ended around the country.
Many Democrats and immigration advocates viewed it as nothing more than an excuse for the United States to avoid its moral and legal obligation to offer safe haven to asylum-seekers at the border.