WASHINGTON—The Biden administration plans to end its use of Title 42, a Trump-era pandemic border policy that allows the government to immediately turn away people who are arrested trying to enter the country illegally, as well as those who seek asylum at a border checkpoint, by the end of May, according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and officials familiar with the matter.
When Title 42 comes to an end, the government once more will need to detain every migrant it arrests before it can deport...
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WASHINGTON—The Biden administration plans to end its use of Title 42, a Trump-era pandemic border policy that allows the government to immediately turn away people who are arrested trying to enter the country illegally, as well as those who seek asylum at a border checkpoint, by the end of May, according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and officials familiar with the matter.
When Title 42 comes to an end, the government once more will need to detain every migrant it arrests before it can deport them or release them to seek asylum.
Border officials have expressed concern that, without the rapid-turnback policy, they will quickly be overwhelmed by migrants, leading to dangerous overcrowding in border facilities and releases of people into the U.S. who would normally be jailed or deported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says in its order, which the agency plans to issue later this week, that it is taking the step because “there is no longer a serious danger” that migrants would introduce or spread Covid-19 inside immigration-detention facilities.
The CDC is delaying the implementation of the order until May 23 to allow the Department of Homeland Security to prepare for what the government anticipates will be a sharp rise in crossings this spring.
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The order is pending at the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and could become final as soon as Wednesday. The CDC faces a Wednesday deadline to decide whether to end the policy as part of the administration’s periodic review, which it has conducted every 60 days.
President Biden, asked Wednesday at the White House about Title 42, said, “We’ll have a decision on that soon.”
Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, said at a press briefing Wednesday that the administration was “planning for multiple contingencies and we have every expectation that when the CDC ultimately decides it’s appropriate to lift Title 42, there will be an influx of people to the border. And so we are doing a lot of work to plan for that contingency.”
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Under Title 42, any migrant asking for humanitarian protection at the southern border could still be expelled back to Mexico or deported to another country without a consideration of their claims, though in practice Mexico limited how many people it was willing to take back.
In recent weeks, with the CDC’s deadline looming, the administration came under pressure from many Democrats to end the policy and restore the asylum process at the border.
“Migrants have been cruelly expelled from our country under the guise of Title 42,” said Rep. Juan Vargas, a California Democrat who represents a district along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Title 42 was never about public health and safety—it was implemented to deny due process to people seeking refuge and protection.”
Several high-profile moderate Democrats, however, broke with their party in recent days, calling on the administration to maintain the policy until they have a comprehensive plan to handle high numbers of migrants. They include both Democratic Arizona senators, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, along with two Texas members of Congress who represent border districts. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) expressed concern Tuesday night in a statement.
Republicans have argued that the administration should keep the order indefinitely and that lifting it would make what they view as the Biden administration’s mismanaged border policy even worse. “Dropping Title 42 without other changes in border policies will produce a tsunami of migrants & drugs,” Sen.
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John Cornyn (R., Texas) said
on Twitter.
The timeline by which the administration plans to wind down Title 42 coincides roughly with the implementation of a new border policy that is meant to speed up sharply the time it takes to deliver a migrant’s asylum decision. White House officials had seen that policy, which asks asylum officers rather than immigration judges to hear claims, as a significant piece of their post-Title 42 border strategy, according to people familiar with their thinking.
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In preparation for the end of Title 42, the Border Patrol started vaccinating migrants it takes into custody this week, DHS confirmed on Monday.
The administration is planning for several scenarios in which daily border crossings climb to as many as 18,000 a day, officials told reporters on a Tuesday call. They are pre-emptively strengthening government contracts for transportation and medical care, the officials said, and adding more staff to handle increased arrivals.
The administration’s hand was forced in part by an appeals court ruling earlier this month, which ruled that, though the government’s use of Title 42 was legal, it also looked like a “relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics, and little certainty.”
President Donald Trump first announced the policy in March 2020 as the U.S. closed many government functions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
He did so over the objections of officials at the CDC, who said the border policy didn’t have any basis in public health, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, had attempted to implement a similar order using the same 1944 public health law in response to measles and flu outbreaks at the border before Covid-19 had been detected, but he was overruled, the Journal reported.
Over the ensuing two years, migrants have been expelled using the policy 1.7 million times, more than half of the total illegal crossings over the period.
The policy had unexpected consequences. Though it initially deterred migrants from crossing the border, because they would immediately be turned back, the policy also wiped away the normal arrest and deportation process, essentially eliminating consequences for crossing the border illegally. As a result, migrants—primarily single adult men from Mexico—tried crossing the border over and over in the hopes of getting into the country undetected.
—Tarini Parti contributed to this article.
Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman+1@wsj.com