by Zachary Stieber at The Epoch Times
President Joe Biden’s administration late March 12 said it was formally ending the expulsion of illegal immigrant children through use of a pandemic-era rule.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), terminated the public health order known as Title 42 with respect to youth who arrive at the border without a responsible adult, a group known as unaccompanied children.
Title 42, imposed during the Trump administration, enabled immigration authorities to expel illegal immigrants because of fears they posed a health threat amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soon after Biden took office in 2021, the government stopped expelling unaccompanied children, alleging doing so was cruel and inhumane.
But U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump nominee, ruled on March 4 that the administration could no longer exempt unaccompanied youth from Title 42.
The children “spend, on average, more than a day clustered at a DHS facility, where they can expose other detainees, DHS personnel, and American citizens and residents to whatever viruses they are carrying,” Pittman said.
The government has been taking care of thousands of unaccompanied children while trying to locate a parent or another responsible adult who can take charge of them. As of March 10, there were about 600 such children in the custody of Customs and Border Protection, which runs facilities at or near the border, and some 9,800 in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS), which manages facilities around the country, according to a government statement. Over 159,000 have been released into the U.S. interior since January 2021.
In its order (pdf) terminating Title 42 with respect to unaccompanied children, Walensky said she found “that there is no longer a serious danger of the introduction, transmission, and spread of COVID-19 into the United States as a result of entry of [the children] and that a suspension of the introduction of [the children] is not required in the interest of public health.”
The termination was based in part…
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