The
Biden administration has so far deported more Haitians in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a whole year, with the use of a highly controversial Trump-era public health order denying asylum seekers basic legal rights, according to a new report.
The report,
The Invisible Wall, published on Thursday by a coalition of immigrant rights groups, focuses on Title 42, part of the 1944 Public Health Service Act invoked a year ago by the Trump administration as grounds for summary expulsion of migrants because of the supposed health risk they posed during the Covid pandemic.
The Biden team has sought to place a moratorium on deportations of immigrants already in the country (though that moratorium has been blocked by a court order), but it has not stopped Title 42 expulsions of newly arrived migrants. The report found the pace of deportation flights to
Haiti in particular had increased dramatically.
“More Haitians have been removed to Haiti in the weeks since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office than during all of fiscal year 2020,” according to the Invisible Wall report, published by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Quixote Center, and the UndocuBlack Network...
On Wednesday the US embassy in Port-au-Prince put out a message from Biden in Creole on its
Twitter account, saying “
Mwen ka di sa byen klé: pa vini” (“I can say quite clearly, don’t come over.”)
The report points out that the Title 42 policy was
forced on a reluctant Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the Trump White House, ordered by Vice President Mike Pence and driven by the hardline anti-immigrant presidential adviser at the time, Stephen Miller.
As the policy requires the deportees to be crammed together in detention centres and then deported on flights, the public health justification for Title 42 rings hollow, the report argues.
