CDC Ends Use of Public Health Law to Deny Rights of Asylum Seekers
On April 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered the termination of the “Title 42” procedure, a method originally created by the Trump administration at the outset of the Covid pandemic to deport asylum seekers without hearing on supposed public health grounds. The termination is to go into effect on May 23, 2022. The termination of the Title 42 procedure has been long overdue.
The consequence of the Title 42 process had been a circumvention of immigration laws that protect the rights of asylum seekers who face risk of persecution or torture in their countries of origin. This CDC order resulted in border agents expelling thousands upon thousands of migrants without taking into account the irreparable harm that may await them.
The Biden Administration had kept this rule in place and used it over 1.2 million times to block migrants from seeking safety in the United States despite criticism that the policy improperly relied on the Covid-19 crisis to violate legal protections guaranteed to refugees under both U.S. and international law.
On September 16, 2021, a U.S. District Judge had granted a preliminary injunction against expulsion of migrant families without any hearing, in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others. After a stay pending appeal, the D.C. Circuit affirmed a narrower version of the injunction on March 4, 2022, holding that the public health law did not override statutory protection against return to a country where an asylum seeker was likely to be persecuted. The injunction followed mounting pressure from immigrant rights groups and voices in academia, including amicus briefs co-submitted by Harvard Law Human Rights Program Director Gerald L. Neuman and Deborah Anker, Founding Director of the Harvard Law Immigration and Refugee Clinic, to end the Title 42 policy. The April 1 order of the CDC does not admit the illegality of the Title 42 process, but it would terminate it altogether, subject to the possibility of later reactivation.
It has long been clear that the severe violations of asylum seekers’ rights caused by Title 42 outweighed the purported health benefits related to pandemic control. Hence, the Biden administration’s repeated defense of this regressive Trump-era policy has been a disappointment to those who had hoped for a more humane and rights-based policy toward refugees and immigrants. Regrettably, the termination order itself may be challenged in other courts.
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For further information regarding the litigation of the Title 42 procedure, you can watch the webinar “Abusing Public Health Powers at the Border: Litigating “Title 42” Deportations Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights” organized by HRP on November 8, 2021, below.