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It may seem strange that the notoriously anti-immigrant Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has been using Texas taxpayers’ money to charter buses to shuttle migrants to Washington, D.C., free of charge. This publicity stunt — which has been panned from both Abbott’s right and from his left — was intended as a protest against the Biden administration’s announcement to end the so-called Title 42 order, a provision which allowsthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to mandate migration restrictions if “there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease.” Title 42 gave Border Patrol the authority to rapidly expel people who cross the border (or who try to present themselves at ports of entry) without any of the legal processes these migrants would normally be entitled to — such as the ability to request refugee protection, a right supposedly guaranteed under international and domestic law.
The Department of Homeland Security announced in April that it would stop using these Title 42 protocols in May, and instead resume processing migrants with its pre-pandemic procedures.
Abbott’s bus scheme was evidently intended to dramatically bring the “border crisis” to the Capitol. Of course, given that the federal government and the state of Texas regularly make a habit of throwing migrants into cells for months at a time, it actually seems counterintuitively nice to launch a voluntary program to bus migrants into a part of the United States with comparatively better immigration courts. Texas (and other conservative states) have, however, also challenged the end of Title 42 in less symbolic ways, bringing multiple lawsuits to argue that the Biden administration simply doesn’t have the authority to end it right now.
On April 27, a judge in one of these lawsuits issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the Biden administration from even beginning to wind down its use of Title 42 expulsions, and the usual cast of “moderate” Democrats, including Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), have joined with Republicans to propose legislation to dictate the terms under which the president might end Title 42, baking these demands in as amendments to a larger bill about Covid relief and aid to Ukraine.
There are a few important things to understand about Title 42 and the opposition to its wind-down. First, the use of Title 42 has never had much to do with public health. When the Trump administration first urged the CDC to allow the mass expulsions of migrants under Title 42, a top CDC official refused on the grounds that there was no evidence it would protect the public or slow the spread of Covid. It was only after Trump administration officials strong-armed the director of the CDC that the order was obediently issued.
Public health experts from a range of institutions have, meanwhile, regularly attacked the CDC’s reasoning as scientifically flawed. The CDC itself has conducted zero research into the relationship between Title 42 and its effect on Covid rates. As one unnamed former official, who spoke with The New Yorker, acknowledged, “[T]he official reasoning for Title 42 may be public health,” but the real reason the Biden administration found it “difficult” to abandon is because “as a migration tool it allows for quick and flexible expulsions.”
In short: Title 42 has always primarily been a tool to militarize the border, not to protect public health. And it is for these purposes of border militarization, not public health, that Title 42 supporters want it extended.