CDC Announces End to Title 42 in May, but Three States Just Filed Suit to Keep the Program in Place
Last Friday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that the Trump-era policy to turn away migrants at the US-Mexico border allegedly for public health reasons will end on May 23. Update: However, three states just filed a lawsuit to keep Title 42 in place (see below for more information).
The program known as Title 42 was implemented after the start of the pandemic in 2020 and remained in place over a year after Biden took office. Interpret this how you will, but Title 42 is bipartisan. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote for Immigration Impact last month, Title 42 has accounted for over 1.5 million expulsions and contributed to tensions along the border that led to dramatic images of Border Patrol officers chasing Haitian migrants on horseback in the fall of 2021.1
I first learned of the CDC announcement on Friday from Camilo Montoya-Galvez (from whom I get a lot of breaking immigration news, so give him a follow if that’s your thing).
The order issued by Director Walensky is thirty pages long and addresses a wide range of substantive and procedural issues.
Are lawsuits on the way? Probably. We now live in a world where any immigration policy change by any administration is likely to be met by a slew of litigation. If the rescission of Title 42 isn’t challenged in court (and let’s hope for taxpayers’ sake that it isn’t), it would be an outlier. In fact, I’m writing the first draft of this post on Friday afternoon in preparation to publish this for you on Monday, and I’m fully prepared to need to revise this on Sunday evening with announcements from Republican governors that they are prepared to litigate.
MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: And there it is. On Sunday, Arizona, Missouri, and Louisiana jointly filed a lawsuit in the Western District of Louisiana to challenge the CDC’s plans to terminate Title 42 next month. The lawsuit claims that the end of Title 42 will lead to “the abrupt elimination of the only safety valve preventing this Administration’s disastrous border policies from devolving into an unmitigated chaos and catastrophe.” (See: 6:22-cv-00885 Louisiana et al v. Disease Control & Prevention et al.)
Stay tuned for more information about this lawsuit.
Looking for source materials for this post? Here they are.
The CDC’s press announcement is available here.
The text of the official order from CDC Director Walensky is available here.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas’s announcement related to the rescission of Title 42 is available here.
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In my attempt to try to find an update on the investigation of the incident, it appears that only the New York Post reported on the fact that recently the officer being investigated for his role in the incident was cleared of all wrongdoing. I initially linked to the New York Post article but removed the link after the website’s atrocious level of ads and media content froze my browser for a good three minutes. If anyone can find a reputable source of reporting on this latest news, please post it in the comments.