BREAKING: Las Americas IAC Condemns Biden Administration New Border Strategy

For Immediate Release: January 5, 2023

“The only lasting solutions at our border are rooted in fair and humane applications of asylum law”

EL PASO, TEXAS – As part of a new border strategy, President Biden announced today that Title 42 expulsions will be expanded to include migrants from Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. This change comes alongside a process that will allow migrants from these countries with U.S. financial sponsors to enter through a program modeled after previous policies that provided safe haven for a limited number of Venezuelans and Ukrainians.

Marisa Limón Garza, Executive Director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center shared the following statement: 

“With this new border strategy, the Biden administration puts politics before human lives. As a deterrence approach, Title 42 is a failure. It has only encouraged migrants to cross repeatedly and in increasingly remote and dangerous areas. Through this policy, migrants’ lives and wellbeing are at risk through kidnapping, smuggling, labor trafficking, and other human rights violations. 

“Beyond this, it is disingenuous to say that expanding the use of Title 42 and subverting the normal application of immigration and asylum law has been the success President Biden claims. In El Paso, we have seen how the application of Title 42 to Venezuelans has placed migrants in situations where they seek to evade U.S. immigration authorities. This has the knock-on effect of complicating efforts to meet the basic humanitarian needs–food, shelter, and sanitation–of this population. Expanding Title 42 has made responding to events at the border in a safe, orderly, and humane manner more difficult.

“Ultimately we know that the only lasting solutions at our border are rooted in fair and humane applications of asylum law with institutions that have the resources, personnel, and flexibility to meet the changing realities of people fleeing harm today.”