The Biden administration is facing the prospect of a new immigration influx as Title 42, a regulation introduced under Donald Trump, is set to be lifted within the next few weeks.
Title 42 is a provision of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 invoked at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as a means to block most asylum seekers from entering the United States. Under Trump and Biden, more than 2 million people have been expelled from the U.S.-Mexico border using Title 42.
While leading advocacy group The Immigration Hub recently argued that the policy has done more harm than good, conservatives say they are concerned that it will lead to an increase in migration if it's lifted on May 11, 2023, as planned.
With this in mind, the White House received some criticism this week after making the claim that ahead of the lift, "unlawful immigration" had actually decreased.
The Claim
A tweet by RNC Research, posted on April 25, 2023, viewed 147,400 times, said: "6.3+ million illegal immigrants have crossed the border since Biden took office, but Karine Jean-Pierre thinks 'unlawful immigration is down.'"
An attached video clip showed Jean-Pierre saying: "The Department of Homeland Security shared their plan back in January and we have seen from the data, we have seen unlawful immigration is down and so what they have put forth in their protocol and processes is working."
The Facts
The clip shared on Twitter is taken from a White House press conference, held on April 25, 2023, during which Jean-Pierre was asked what government preparations were for the lift of Title 42.
A Homeland Security press release from January 2023 said that earlier that month, President Joe Biden had announced additional border enforcement measures that it claimed led to a reduction in "unlawful southwest border crossings."
The release said that "Encounters with individuals" from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela declined 97 percent compared to December 2022.
Measures included the increased use of "expedited removal" for those entering the U.S. without permission, expanding "Legal Pathways for Safe, Orderly, and Humane Migration" and the proposal of new regulation "that would encourage individuals to seek orderly and lawful pathways to migration and reduce overcrowding along the southwest border."
This might be the achievement that Jean-Pierre is pointing to and gives us a rough sense of what time period she might have referred to. However, the data suggests is not as sturdy as her statement indicates.
For a start, the term "unlawful immigration" isn't a term routinely used in White House statistic collections and could refer to a number of metrics.
Newsweek reached out to the White House on multiple occasions to clarify what statistics Jean-Pierre referred to.
While the specific data is yet to be provided, a White House spokesperson said what it intended to send would show "how unlawful border crossings went down significantly since we implemented new border enforcement measures in January."
However, recent data on Southwest border apprehensions and encounters under Title 8 and Title 42 provide a mixed picture.
The number of these encounters decreased in January and February this year but rose in March. Encounters under both titles rose last month, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
And while the number of encounters under these titles is lower than it was in March 2022, the fiscal year total for 2023 is 160,674 higher than at the same point in the fiscal year 2022.
Still, the average number of apprehensions in the first three months of the year is lower than it was in the first three months of 2022 (even if they were preceded by significantly higher encounters between October and December compared to the year before).
It appears whether "unlawful immigration is down" is something of a political argument if these are the statistics the White House wishes to rely on. While the picture for this year might have begun to show a slight improvement, apprehensions and expulsions remain at a 30-year high.
The Ruling
Unverified.
Government data shows that apprehensions and expulsions at the Southwest border decreased month-on-month in January and February.
However, it rose again in March and while some other comparative metrics suggest that by some measures unauthorized or unlawful migration (at the border) at least is slowing, this is not a uniform improvement.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
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.
