(NewsNation) — There’s been a lot of coverage about Title 42 expiring on May 11, but what can Americans expect to change?
Title 42 took effect during the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed officials on the United States side of the border to turn away migrants in order to slow the spread of the virus.
Currently, anyone found entering the U.S. without authorization or showing up at a land border without the proper documents can be expelled back to Mexico.
That doesn’t apply to unaccompanied children, however, and Mexico’s government is increasingly refusing to accept families and anyone other than their own nationals and those from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
When Title 42 expires, the U.S. Department of Human Services will no longer be able to turn away migrants for public health reasons. Instead, they must process and detain anyone who enters the country without authorization.
How that works depends on who’s arriving and why.
Those who arrive as families will be released into the country because the Biden Administration has chosen not to detain them, said Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Ideally, they’d be issued notices to appear and released to go to a final destination in the United States,” he said.
Single adults arriving will be processed under Title 8 for expedited removal.
“Expedited removal is a tool Congress gave DHS back in 1996 to quickly expel aliens who enter the United States illegally,” Arthur said.
Asylum-seekers arriving will go through a credible fear screening process to determine if they’re eligible.
Arthur anticipates that U.S. Customs and Border Protection will set up tents along the border, where migrants will be processed.
“If they make an asylum claim where they’ve received that credible fear interview…there’ll be telephones so that they can consult with attorneys in the United States before they go through that process,” Arthur said.