WASHINGTON -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that it would lift an emergency public health order that had restricted immigration at U.S. land borders since the beginning of the pandemic, citing "current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight COVID-19."
Federal officials expect the policy change, which will go into effect May 23, to draw thousands more migrants to the southwest border every day, in addition to the already high number of people who have been arriving over the past year from Latin America and across the globe.
Republicans, who have described the border situation as out of control under President Joe Biden, immediately condemned the CDC's decision. The order has been used to expel migrants about 1.7 million times over the past two years.
"These measures, along with the current public health landscape where 97.1% of the U.S. population lives in a county identified as having 'low' COVID-19 community level, will sufficiently mitigate the covid-19 risk for U.S. communities," the CDC said in a statement. The CDC also said it has the right to issue the order again if necessary.
The order, known as Title 42, gives officials the authority to turn away migrants at the border, including those seeking asylum. The process takes about 15 minutes, a factor that has helped the Border Patrol manage the sometimes overwhelming number of migrants gathering at the border.
Without the order in place, stations will be more crowded and backed up while officials go through the typical screening process, which can take more than an hour per person.
The continuation of the public health order over the past two years thrust the typically apolitical CDC into the heated immigration debate.
The agency had been under growing pressure from Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, to not only end the rule but also provide justification for why it was necessary.
News of the decision broke Wednesday. It is expected to face legal challenges.
VIRUS CASES DECLINE
Public health experts have questioned the order's value in containing the coronavirus, especially at this point in the pandemic. The Biden administration began offering vaccinations to migrants at the border this week.
When the CDC explained in August why it was extending the order, covid-19 cases were averaging more than 60,000 a day, the highly transmissible delta variant was causing more hospitalizations, and the number of deaths caused by the virus was increasing.
Currently, case numbers have fallen sharply in most of the U.S., and the CDC has loosened many restrictions. The average number of cases Thursday was less than 28,000 a day. An omicron subvariant, BA.2, could cause another surge in the U.S. in the coming months, though it does not appear to be causing widespread severe illness in Europe, where caseloads are higher.
The White House and Department of Homeland Security have deflected questions about the policy in recent months to the CDC, which said little about its rationale for extending the order.
But unlike with other public health measures put in place during the pandemic, the CDC never publicly disclosed scientific data that showed that migrants crossing the border were a major vector for the coronavirus.
"It's far from clear that the CDC's order serves any purpose," a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote in a ruling in March on a case about the public health rule.
The order -- which advocates say has put many people who were expelled under it in grave danger because of violence, poverty and instability in their home countries -- has faced several lawsuits. Immigration advocates were under the impression that the Biden administration was working to lift the rule last summer for some migrants, but that never happened.
Some advocates said this week that waiting until late May to lift the order would further endanger the lives of vulnerable migrants seeking asylum.
"Given how long the administration has had to plan for the end of Title 42, the number of lives at stake daily and the court decisions finding Title 42 illegal, it is essential the administration immediately begins winding down Title 42 and not wait to do so until the end of May," said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who has been one of the lead voices arguing that the rule should be lifted for migrant families.
Some critics have also said that the rule has fueled racist notions that immigrants carry infection into the United States.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, has said that immigrants were not a driving force in the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S.
"Focusing on immigrants, expelling them or what have you, is not the solution to an outbreak," he said on CNN in October.
Even before the pandemic, the Trump administration tried to get the CDC to use its authority to issue such an order to address an outbreak of mumps in immigration detention centers in six states, and separately when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu. Those attempts were not successful, in part because other administration officials argued that there was no legal basis.
CLASH IN MEXICO
Some 500 migrants from Central America, Venezuela and elsewhere fought with Mexican police, National Guard and immigration officers in southern Mexico Friday in one of the first such marches this year.
The migrants described the march as a traditional annual protest related to Holy Week, and those at the front carried a white cross, as others have done in previous years.
This year, the protest came two weeks early and some participants said they would go far beyond the usual short march and try to reach the U.S. border.
In a clash with National Guard officers and immigration agents, the migrants used the cross they were carrying as a battering ram to break through the Guard lines, shattering the wooden cross.
The officers, who had riot shields, batons and what appeared to be an irritant spray, detained some marchers. The two sides exchanged blows and many migrants left behind knapsacks in the melee.
Some managed to break through and disappear down dirt roads and paths, but many of the rest of the marchers took refuge in a church just a few miles outside of Tapachula.
The migrants set out from the southern Mexico city of Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, early Friday. Migrants have complained they have been confined to Tapachula by the slow processing of their asylum cases and that they are unable to find work in the border state of Chiapas that would allow them to support their families.
"They do not allow us to leave this state because we are not regularized here," said Venezuelan migrant Noreydi Chavez. "They require us to get a visa, but we never get any answers. We fill out paperwork, but they never process it."
Reynaldo Bello, a migrant from Peru, joined the march with his wife and baby because the family had been living a park and going hungry while waiting for their immigration paperwork to be processed.
Luis Garcia Villagran, an immigration activist with the Center for Human Dignification, said Mexican immigration authorities had largely shut off most visa processes in Tapachula and told migrants the only path to regularize their stay in Mexico was through the much lengthier procedure of applying for asylum or refugee status.
A migrant march in the same area was broken up in January, and similar efforts were dissolved by police and immigration agents in 2021 and 2020.
The marches are significantly smaller than caravans in 2018 and 2019 that brought thousands of migrants to the U.S. border.
The caravans began several years ago as a way for migrants who did not have the money to pay smugglers to take advantage of safety in numbers as they moved toward the U.S. border. However, Guatemala and Mexico became more aggressive in breaking up the caravans.
The Mexican government has tried to appease the United States by stopping caravans of walking migrants and allowing reinstatement of the so called Remain in Mexico policy.
But Mexico has been unable to stanch the flood of migrants stuffed by the hundreds into trucks operated by smugglers who charge thousands of dollars to take them to the U.S. border, trips that all too often turn deadly.
Information for this article was contributed by Eileen Sullivan of The New York Times and by Edgar H. Clemente of The Associated Press.