‘The Borders Have To Be Secure’: Manchin Voices Support For Trump-Era Border Policy

As the Biden administration is reportedly planning to end Title 42 – a border security policy from former President Trump’s administration – despite the ongoing border crisis, Democrat Senator Joe Manchin (WV) has voiced his opposition to the move and suggested that Title 42 should be made permanent.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the “Biden administration plans to end its use of Title 42, a Trump-era pandemic border policy that allows the government to immediately turn away migrants at the southern border, by the end of May.”

In response to the news, Manchin told reporters, “I think they should reconsider. I sent a letter, I’m against removing Title 42.”

“If anything we should be looking at permanency on Title 42,” he said. “Maybe that would spur us to get a good immigration policy that works for Americans and secure our borders — the borders have to be secure.”

Manchin called for Title 42 to be extended in a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky earlier this week.

Manchin wrote in the letter, “In Fiscal Year (FY) 2021, encounters with migrants reached an all-time high of 1.7 million people. That is four times higher than the 400,000 encounters reported the previous year, and we are on pace to set a new record again this year. Through the first five months of FY22, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has experienced more than 838,000 migrant encounters. Unfortunately, due to annual migration patterns, those numbers are only expected to increase during the upcoming spring and summer months.”

“The current Order under Title 42 suspending the right to introduce certain persons into the United States has been an important tool in combatting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. With encounters along our southern border surging and the highly-transmissible Omicron BA.2 subvariant emerging as the dominate strain in the United States, now is not the time to throw caution to the wind. I urge you to again renew this commonsense policy that has been in effect—under both Republican and Democratic Administrations—since March 2020,” he continued.