The crisis on the southern border has gotten so bad that the Biden administration is now flying illegal migrants across Texas to El Paso. Once there, they are processed and dumped back into Mexico. Overcrowding of detention centers and Title 42 are the reasons cited for the change in how Biden originally decided to handle the crisis.

Title 42 of the United States Code Section 265 allows CBP to quickly expel illegal migrants after they are taken into custody. President Trump ordered Title 42 to be in effect on March 21, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic became a factor in illegal immigration. Expulsions under Title 42 are not based on immigration status. They are tracked separately from immigration enforcement actions. Title 42 specifically deals with the issue of public health. It is meant to prevent spreading COVID-19 into border facilities and further into the United States. The Biden administration has been criticized for using catch and release for illegal migrants detained by CBP. The migrants being bussed out of border towns are being found to be COVID-19 positive yet allowed to travel out of Texas and into other states.

Open Borders Joe and his administration are still referring to the crisis on the southern border as a “challenge”. However, as Jazz wrote earlier, Biden is sending FEMA to help out. It’s a rapidly escalating crisis and he knows it, he just wants to deny reality. The fact is that the Biden administration was caught flat-footed and ill-prepared to handle what is happening. Mexicans and Central Americans heard his words on the campaign trail and noted that in his first days in office he set about undoing policies that were working during the Trump administration. He is hellbent to be the anti-Trump president and that is not a good thing when it comes to border security. Now he is falling back on Title 42, a move enacted by Trump. Biden, you will remember, was quick to call Trump a racist xenophobe for trying to keep the coronavirus out of the U.S. by shutting down the borders.

The overcrowding on the southern border has resulted in non-profits and NGOs preparing to handle the overflow of illegal migrants as they are held for processing before they are sent elsewhere. Instead of remaining in shelters provided by these agencies, the Biden administration is flying them hundreds of miles away from where they entered from the Rio Grande Valley to El Paso. Once in El Paso, they are dumped back into Mexico by CBP. These expulsions include children with families.

El Paso County officials and migrant advocates said Saturday they had been told they would receive as many as 270 migrants per day in two separate flights from the Rio Grande Valley. But instead, many migrants are being sent back across the border to Ciudad Juárez under Title 42, a public health order put in use during the Trump era that allows the government to immediately expel migrants at the border because of the coronavirus pandemic.

CBP has not said how many people have been expelled from the U.S. since the flights began last week, but The News has learned that at least 50 were expelled to Juárez on Thursday alone.

Landon R. Hutchens, a CBP spokesman, blamed the overcrowding in South Texas for the expulsions. He stressed that the expulsions of immigrant families and single adults continues under Title 42 and is applied to people who cross without authorization. The Biden administration has stopped the practice of expelling immigrant children who cross the border alone.

So, CBP is flying them across Texas to ease the overcrowding at the border, only to transport them back to Mexico, far away from where they entered. How is that a better idea than immediate expulsion from the point at which they entered the U.S.? Biden’s approach is not only more costly but it puts the migrants at risk. Once back in Mexico, they are prey for cartels and human traffickers. Biden and his administration want to promote the idea that their ideas are more humane than those of the Trump administration, which are described as “draconian”, yet that’s hard to understand when illegal migrants are moved around in a puzzling way. Organizations in El Paso, who were alerted to prepare for incoming migrants, are surprised.

The move has flummoxed a Mexican state official and U.S. nonprofit organizations who had prepared shelters in this city for the overflow.

“This is a game changer and very concerning,” said Ruben Garcia, executive director and founder of Annunciation House, an NGO, which had prepared to receive the migrants flown in twice a day. He said the number of migrants arriving is “not even close to what we were told would be arriving.”

Marisa Limon Garza, deputy director of Hope Border Institute in El Paso. said she met a family of four who said they had just been flown from the Rio Grande Valley on Thursday and then expelled into Juárez.

“I don’t understand their logic; I can’t square it and I don’t understand the rationale, or how the rules are being applied to some people and not to others,” Limon Garza said. “This doesn’t make sense to me.”

The Biden administration’s implementation and interpretation of Title 42 is “disturbing”.

“This is the first time I know of that we received people under Title 42 that were sent here after being picked up in a border far away, people who had crossed in Reynosa, McAllen, thousands of miles away and expelled here,” Valenzuela said. “This is new and definitely very disturbing, especially during a pandemic.”

He said he hasn’t been told by U.S. authorities whether it would now be standard practice to pick up migrants in far away border regions, fly them to other border cities, and then rapidly expel them. He said shelters in Juarez are running at or near capacity, and called the coming days and weeks “very difficult, very complicated.”

This isn’t an effective solution. There is overcrowding on both sides of the border because of Biden’s open invitation to people wanting to flood the border and cross into the U.S. illegally. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy prepares to visit El Paso on Monday with a delegation of Republican lawmakers. A Democrat congresswoman from El Paso (who holds the seat formerly occupied by Beto O’Rourke) blames Republicans for Biden’s failures, natch.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, called the delegation’s scheduled trip to El Paso the latest “political opportunity for Republicans to rile up their base, push xenophobia, bash the border, bash Biden and bash immigrants.”

Border security and mitigating the coronavirus pandemic is not pushing xenophobia, as Biden has found out the hard way. Republicans do not want to “bash immigrants” but to uphold laws of legal immigration. Bashing Biden, though? Yeah, there is plenty of reason to do that.