Manchin Says Biden Should Secure Title 42 Extension

Illegal immigrants walk across the Rio Grande to surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents in El Paso, Texas, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, on Dec.13, 2022. Herika Martinez/AFP via Getty Images

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) says President Joe Biden should request an extension of the Dec. 21 court deadline for the expiration of the Title 42 public health policy under which illegal immigrants have been expelled from the United States since the onset of the COVID pandemic.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the policy was unlawful and gave the Biden administration until Dec. 21 to revoke the measure.

“The president can basically, I think, ask for that extension,” Manchin told CBS on Dec. 18. “I think his administration is doing that or will do that. I sure hope they do. But we need an extension until we can get a viable answer for this.”

Manchin made the comment while discussing a bipartisan letter that he and three Texas lawmakers—Republicans Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Tony Gonzalez and Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar—sent to the president last week urging him to find a way to extend the deadline while Congress negotiates a long-term solution to the border crisis.

“While admittedly imperfect, termination of the CDC’s Title 42 order at this time will result in a complete loss of operational control over the southern border, a profoundly negative impact on border communities, and significant suffering and fatalities among the migrants unlawfully entering the United States,” the legislators wrote in their Dec. 13 letter.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, presides over a hearing on battery technology in Washington, on Sept. 22, 2022. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Created in 1944, Title 42 was designed to prevent the introduction of contagious diseases into the United States. In response to the COVID pandemic, the law was invoked in March 2020 to allow U.S. border officials to block the asylum claims of immigrants coming from countries with high COVID-19 infection rates.

When asked on Dec. 18 what Congress could do to address the problem, Manchin noted: “We could pass a piece of legislation, emergency piece of legislation, if we could all come to an agreement that basically Title 42 has to be by law extended and have the President sign it immediately. I guess that could be done.”

The Legal Battle for the Border

Although the Title 42 border policy has now been implemented under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the latter has sought to end the policy’s use in recent months. However, that move has been frustrated by legal challenges.

On April 1, the administration announced that it would terminate the emergency order invoking Title 42 on May 23 following a reassessment of the national public health situation.

In May, however, those plans were halted by U.S. District Judge Robert Summerhays, who granted a nationwide injunction blocking the administration from ending the rule, holding that the public hadn’t been given enough notice or opportunity to comment on the change in policy.

At the time, the Justice Department (DOJ) vowed to appeal that decision, stating that the order was “no longer warranted” given that the threat posed by the COVID pandemic had lessened.

Then, on Nov. 15, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled in a separate case that the Title 42 policy was “arbitrary and capricious,” ordering an immediate halt to the policy’s implementation, though agreeing a day later to extend the deadline to Dec. 21 at the request of the Biden administration.

However, on Dec. 7—just two weeks before the deadline—the Biden administration announced it was appealing Sullivan’s ruling, disagreeing with the judge’s decision to vacate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42 orders, which the administration holds were lawful.

An additional appeal from 19 Republican-led states was rejected on Dec. 16 by a three-judge panel, which held that the states had waited too long to intervene in the case.

“Nowhere in their papers do [the states] explain why they waited eight to fourteen months to move to intervene,” the judges wrote in their opinion, referencing the Biden administration’s April announcement of its intention to end Title 42.

Those states plan to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Implications

Despite the growing concerns of those along the southern border, the Biden administration, for its part, has maintained that the situation there is “under control.”

At a Nov. 17 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that preparations for a post-Title 42 influx of illegal immigrants were underway.

“What we are doing is precisely what we announced we would do in April of this year, and we have indeed been executing on the plan,” Mayorkas said, adding that “the plan” was to send resources and support to the border and increase processing efficiency to mitigate overcrowding.

Additionally, following the appeals court decision on Dec. 16, White House assistant press secretary Abdullah Hasan emphasized that lifting Title 42 restrictions would not mean “that the border is open.”

“We will continue to fully enforce our immigration laws and work to expand legal pathways for migration while discouraging disorderly and unsafe migration,” Hassan said. “We have a robust effort underway to manage the border in a safe, orderly, and humane way when Title 42 lifts as required by court order.”

White House officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.