Criminal smugglers, hoping to increase profits, have been incorrectly telling would-be migrants that the end of the COVID-19 emergency and the associated expiration of Title 42 authorities will allow people to more easily come into the U.S. That is not the case, according to Biden Administration officials.

But there has also been a counter-intuitive impact of the use of Title 42 authorities during the pandemic, say Administration officials and immigration experts. Those quick, summary expulsions meant officials stopped recording the entry of each migrant or inquired about what dangers drove them to leave home. That was expedient, but had an unintended outcome. Many migrants that were summarily expelled, and then tried to enter again and again, multiplying the number of people Border Patrol agents encountered in a year.

“Title 42, ironically, actually increased the number of people admitted to the U.S.,” says Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. “A tool that was designed to expel people without even a hearing became the reason why a lot of people were admitted to the U.S. because they would make repeated attempts and by the fourth or fifth time, they were in.”

[We’ve been in a border crisis for over two years, and Time Magazine is only getting around to noticing it? It will get worse when Title 42 expires, but it’s already at catastrophic levels along the southern border and has been ever since Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas took office. The media has paid scant attention to it before now, except to note how Republican governors have forced sanctuary cities and states to live with their incentive-setting rhetoric. — Ed]