President Joe Biden made a joke at the media's expense on Sunday when he was asked about the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border following last week's expiration of Title 42.
The immigration policy known as Title 42 expired at midnight on Thursday. First enacted by former President Donald Trump, the pandemic-era rule allowed border officials to expel migrants without an asylum process in an effort to stop the potential spread of COVID-19.
Numerous media outlets—as well as politicians—had predicated there would be a drastic spike in migrants crossing over illegally into the United States after Title 42's expiration. However, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sunday that Border Patrol had experienced a 50 percent drop in the number of encounters in the first two days after the policy's expiration versus what they had experienced earlier in the week.
"Much better than you all expected," Biden said to reporters about the state of the border while taking a bicycle ride near his vacation residence in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Mayorkas gave his Border Patrol assessment while appearing on CNN's State of the Union.
"It is still early. We are in day three. But we have been planning for this transition for months and months," he said.
The homeland security secretary added that Border Patrol agents had about 6,300 encounters with migrants crossing the border illegally on Friday and 4,200 on Saturday. Mayorkas said that agents had more than 10,000 such encounters in the days leading up to Title 42's expiration.
Meanwhile, leaders from communities along the border also reported they had not seen the influx of migrants that many people had feared would come.
"Everything that we have been doing since the declaration of emergency has held up, and we have not been overwhelmed at this point," Victor Trevino—mayor of Laredo, Texas, told CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday. "The amount of migrants we were expecting initially—the big flow—is not here yet."
But Josh Kun, a professor and chair in cross-cultural communication at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, cautioned against using the word "calm" when describing the current situation at the border.
"We have to define what is meant by 'calmness,'" Kun told Newsweek on Monday. "Things are certainly not calm for refugees and migrants seeking and waiting for asylum in camps and shelters at militarized borders."
He continued: "Things are not calm for people waiting for asylum court dates in a backlogged legal system. We can't measure calm from the viewpoint of border security. We must measure calm from the viewpoint of those seeking asylum and freedom."
In Rehoboth Beach, the press asked Biden about the numbers cited by Mayorkas, specifically wanting to know if he felt confident that the border crossing numbers had peaked and would continue to decrease.
"Well, look, they have gone down. My hope is they'll continue to go down, but we have a lot more work to do," he said. "And we need some more help from the Congress as well in terms of funding and legislative changes."
The president, who sent 1,500 active-duty troops to the border ahead of Title 42's expiration, was also asked if he had any plans to visit the U.S.-Mexico border.
"Not in the near term, no," Biden said. "No, it would just be disruptive, not anything else."
Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for further comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jon Jackson is an Associate Editor at Newsweek based in New York. His focus is on reporting on the Ukraine ... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.
