How the Biden Administration Made the Border Crisis Inevitable

...Title 42 is a provision of U.S. immigration law that allows federal health authorities to deny asylum to refugees who might increase the spread of infectious diseases. The Biden administration exempted “unaccompanied minors” from being sent home under Title 42 on its very first day, when Mexico decided, under a new law, not to take them back. On February 2, 2021, BuzzFeed News reporter Hamed Aleaziz filed what was probably the earliest known report of this policy reversal. In response to a direct inquiry from Aleaziz, a White House spokesperson confirmed the policy for the first time, stating that the new administration policy “is not to expel unaccompanied children who arrive at our borders.”

...A central root cause of the child-migrant crisis was born of a strange policy confluence that migrant families quickly discovered as exploitable. For a long time under Biden’s new admittance policies, families with children under seven years old got a free ride in immediately. So did minors up to age 18 — if they showed up without parents.

Those policies meant that families who came with kids between the ages of seven and 18 couldn’t all get in together. But if they split up on the Mexico side, the older kids would cross alone and ring the “unaccompanied minor” bell. The parent or parents with the younger kids could then cross and ring the “family” bell...more