The White House says it’s helping Texas officials prepare for an incoming surge of an estimated 60,000 Haitian migrants.
“As you can imagine, we’re working with the leaders in the region on this issue of migrants coming to the border, but we do have a system in place that we’re going to continue to follow,” White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in response to a question from the Washington Examiner’s Katherine Doyle on Tuesday. “We continue to have the push factors in telling folks, ‘This is not the time to come,’ and we’re going to continue to do what we’ve been doing in the past.”
Jean-Pierre explained that the Biden administration will continue to enforce Title 42 as a “public health authority” to prioritize that “families and single adults are expelled under the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] directive when possible.”
“The determination of who can be expelled or not is determined by a number of factors, including the makeup of the specific family unit and agreements with the country of origin or last residence,” she continued. “As we have stated, those who cannot be expelled are placed into removal proceedings.”
Immigration experts and Texas officials believe that the next wave of incoming Haitian migrants could be four times as large as the 15,000-strong contingent that camped out at the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in September.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently tweeted that the “Texas National Guard is gearing up at the border for increased caravans attempting to cross the border caused by Biden’s open border policy.”
“I’ve never seen this,” Abbott claimed during an interview in late September. “We have multiple reports about different caravans coming to different regions across the border. And so what we’re going to do in response to it as we are preparing, as we speak, is exactly what you saw at the apex moment when people were coming across the river in Del Rio.”