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The Just Security Podcast

A New Era for U.S. Asylum?

May 12, 2023 Just Security Episode 26
A New Era for U.S. Asylum?
The Just Security Podcast
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The Just Security Podcast
A New Era for U.S. Asylum?
May 12, 2023 Episode 26
Just Security

This week a U.S. public health measure known as Title 42 came to an end. The U.S. is supposed to allow people fleeing persecution to seek asylum. But Title 42 allowed the Department of Homeland Security to turn away asylum-seekers if detention centers lacked the room to hold them during the asylum vetting process. The policy made it difficult for migrants to even apply for asylum in the first place. They would often be released back into Mexico. But now, the old rules are back in place, and thousands of asylum seekers who have been stuck in limbo are poised to seek asylum again.

The Biden administration is also rolling out a new set of policies designed to address asylum claims before migrants physically reach the U.S. border. It’s created a mobile app which people can use to schedule an appointment with immigration officials and the State Department is working on plans to open regional processing centers throughout the Western hemisphere.  

The new measures could upend a simple idea at the heart of a complex immigration system: that people fleeing violence and persecution have the chance to find refuge in the United States. That change has massive implications for those who live in the U.S. and those trying to reach it.  

To help us understand the end of Title 42 and what comes next we have Adam Cox, Michelle Hackman, and Cristina Rodriguez. Michelle is a reporter who covers immigration at the Wall Street Journal. Adam and Cristina are law professors at NYU and Yale respectively. They wrote a book called “The President and Immigration Law.”  

Show Notes: 

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Show Notes Transcript

This week a U.S. public health measure known as Title 42 came to an end. The U.S. is supposed to allow people fleeing persecution to seek asylum. But Title 42 allowed the Department of Homeland Security to turn away asylum-seekers if detention centers lacked the room to hold them during the asylum vetting process. The policy made it difficult for migrants to even apply for asylum in the first place. They would often be released back into Mexico. But now, the old rules are back in place, and thousands of asylum seekers who have been stuck in limbo are poised to seek asylum again.

The Biden administration is also rolling out a new set of policies designed to address asylum claims before migrants physically reach the U.S. border. It’s created a mobile app which people can use to schedule an appointment with immigration officials and the State Department is working on plans to open regional processing centers throughout the Western hemisphere.  

The new measures could upend a simple idea at the heart of a complex immigration system: that people fleeing violence and persecution have the chance to find refuge in the United States. That change has massive implications for those who live in the U.S. and those trying to reach it.  

To help us understand the end of Title 42 and what comes next we have Adam Cox, Michelle Hackman, and Cristina Rodriguez. Michelle is a reporter who covers immigration at the Wall Street Journal. Adam and Cristina are law professors at NYU and Yale respectively. They wrote a book called “The President and Immigration Law.”  

Show Notes: 

Paras Shah: This week, a U.S. public health measure known as Title 42 came to an end. In the hours leading up to its expiration, the U.S. increased security at the Mexico border, rolling out razor wire as active duty military and national guardsmen joined Border Patrol agents. That’s because as of today, May 12, 2023, the pandemic-era measure, which brought asylum claims to a trickle, is over. 

The United States is supposed to allow people fleeing persecution to seek asylum. But Title 42 allowed the Department of Homeland Security to turn away asylum-seekers if detention centers lacked the room to hold them during the asylum vetting process. The process made it really, really difficult for migrants to even apply for asylum in the first place. They would often be released back into Mexico.  But now, the old rules are back in place, and thousands of asylum seekers who have been stuck in limbo are poised to seek asylum again.

The Biden administration has established new policies to ease the bottleneck of migrants that is sure to come. Asylum-seekers can no longer be turned away without screening, and will be held in detention centers while they’re assessed, as the number of daily appointments is set to dramatically increase.

Meanwhile, the administration is rolling out a set of new policies designed to address asylum claims before migrants ever reach the U.S. border. It’s created a mobile app which people can use to schedule an appointment with immigration officials, though that’s a challenge for people fleeing violence and poverty. The State Department is also working on plans to open regional processing centers throughout the Western hemisphere, though a precise timeline remains unclear.  

The new measures could upend a simple idea at the heart of a complex immigration system: that people fleeing violence and persecution have the chance to seek refuge in the United States. That change has massive implications for those living in the U.S. and those trying to reach it.   

This is the Just Security podcast. I’m your host Paras Shah. 

To help us understand the end of Title 42 and what comes next we have Adam Cox, Michelle Hackman, and Cristina Rodriguez. Michelle is a reporter who covers immigration at the Wall Street Journal. Adam and Cristina are law professors at NYU and Yale respectively. They wrote a book called The President and Immigration Law.

Hi Michelle, Adam, Cristina. Welcome to the show. 

Michelle Hackman: Thanks for having us. 

Cristina Rodriguez: Great to be here.

Adam Cox: Good to be here this morning.

Paras: Michelle, I want to start with a little bit of history and background to help us understand what's happening at the border this week. Where do we need to start in order to understand asylum law and the history of it?

Michelle: The idea of asylum actually goes back to World War II and the Holocaust. You know, there was this really famous incident in the late 1930s, when a boat full of Jews came to the US from Germany, and we actually rejected them. We turned them away and sent them back to Germany. After the Holocaust, I think there was a reckoning among Western countries about sort of how poorly they'd handled this situation and sort of sentenced people to their deaths by not accepting them as refugees. And so this new idea came about to create a refugee and asylum system internationally, and the idea of asylum really specifically is that if you are running for your life, you probably don't have time to ask a country for permission before you cross their border. That's sort of where the idea really came from.

Paras: Okay, so, asylum is this idea that when you're fleeing persecution, you should be able to go through different countries in order to find a place that's safe and find refuge. How does asylum work for several decades in the United States?

Michelle: So in the US, we actually finally passed an asylum law we had signed on to several treaties in the 1960s. But in 1980, we passed our own law setting up an asylum system with dedicated asylum officers to hear claims, and for the first 30 years or so, asylum was understood to be sort of this little step brother to the refugee system, which took in, you know, 100,000 or so people a year where asylum was like these one off cases. Let's say, you'd have a defector, you know, trying to defect from the Soviet Union, maybe a scientist, maybe a Soviet official, you had waves of really specific people. You know, there were Iranian Jews in the 1980s. There were a lot of Chinese people who had violated the one child policy in China and were fleeing to the US for that reason. People, you know, typically would come as either students or on tourist visas and then say, “Actually, wait, I can't go home.” 

Paras: Okay, so that's the way that the system worked for many years. And then in 2014, there is a flood of people trying to get in from Central America. How does that change the way that we, the United States, think about asylum?

Michelle: It's interesting. So obviously, we've had people crossing our border from Mexico into the US for decades, probably since the founding of the US. But there was this new phenomenon that started in 2014, that I bet a lot of our listeners would remember, was the unaccompanied children crisis, you know, children coming from Central America. You'll remember those images of kids sitting on top of freight trains in Mexico to make their way up to the US border. And the reason that was happening is because it was sort of a new human smuggling tactic in the region, where the smugglers were saying, hey, there are laws in the US that if a child shows up alone at the border, they're presumed to be making an asylum claim, and they go into an asylum proceeding that allows them to stay. And that set off this sort of chain of events where children were coming from Central America, eventually, families were coming from Central America. And more recently, people have been coming from all over Latin America and all over the world to claim asylum at our border, which kicks off this sort of multi year process that in the meantime, allows them to live in the US and work here legally.

Paras: And this started under the Obama administration. But let's fast forward to the Trump administration. How does the Trump administration react to all this, this flood of people arriving at the southern border?

Michelle: We've been talking about this as a crisis since 2014. But the numbers have been going up steadily ever since. I mean, under Obama, we were seeing tens of thousands per year, under the Trump administration, we started seeing hundreds of thousands per year. Now we're even up to seeing potentially millions per year. But Trump, you know, putting aside politics, was really driven – or I would say his advisors especially were really driven – by this idea of, we need to stop people from coming and making asylum claims. They couldn't actually change the law that said once you made an asylum claim that allowed you to, you know, pursue your claim. And so they tried all these tactics to make it like so unsavory for people to come that they would stop coming. They obviously tried separating families. Later on, they tried this, this program called Remain in Mexico where, you know, they would say you can file for asylum, but instead of waiting in the US, we're gonna we can make you wait in Mexico, and come to the border for your hearings, but you can't actually live in the US until you win.

Paras: So what happens with the Trump administration? How do they enact Title 42 and what is Title 42?

Michelle: Title 42 is actually just named after the section of legal code that is the body of public health laws, since we refer to normal immigration processes as Title 8 processes. That's the body of immigration laws. This became sort of the alternative. And it was actually – it started as an idea from Stephen Miller, who was President Trump's sort of top immigration adviser, and he was looking for tools that could actually just allow the government to say no if a migrant asked for asylum. He found this law sort of in this body of public health laws that said, in a public health emergency, if there is a risk that a foreigner could introduce a communicable disease to the US, you can expel them from the country. And so he actually brought this to sort of White House lawyers and said, hey, you know, we have an issue in border patrol detention right now, with the flu and mumps and I think we could use this part of public health law to actually just expel migrants because they potentially could be spreading flu or the mumps or whatever it may be in border detention. That idea got really quickly shut down. That was in 2019. But the idea was sort of ready to go in 2020 when we actually entered a real pandemic.

Paras: So in some ways, the pandemic kind of provides the perfect opportunity for trying to implement this policy that some Trump advisors at least had been thinking about for some time even before the pandemic. Adam and Cristina, how much of a shift is this in US asylum law?

Adam: It's a really big shift, because as Michelle said, Title 42 lets the government just say no. So under our international obligations, and under the 1980 Refugee Act that Michelle described earlier, a foundational principle is that people who arrive in the United States either at the border of the port of entry, or crossing into the interior over the border without permission, are legally entitled to apply for asylum. And then the government has a responsibility and an obligation to screen them to see if they are eligible. And what the Title 42 policy said was, because the screening process itself will create a public health emergency or exacerbate it, we’re shutting it down. And so, people who arrive at ports of entry lawfully, or who crossed the border without permission, can just be turned back, sent back to Mexico, or to their home countries, without ever receiving an asylum hearing of any kind. For the southern border, that's a massive change in American policy.

Now, it is a policy we'd seen elsewhere, because in the Caribbean Basin, for example, the government had long essentially said no, but by interdicting people at sea, because there was only obligation to let people apply for asylum if they actually reached our shores, so long as we could stop them before they got here. The government took the position that it did not have an obligation to let people apply for asylum. So that was the policy that operated for decades, really in the Caribbean Basin with respect to, you know, migrants coming from places like Haiti, but it hadn't been in place at the border, because people could just walk up to the border and thereby trigger the obligation and they get an asylum hearing.

Cristina: What distinguishes expulsions under Title 42 from removals under Title 8, which is the body of immigration laws, is that there are no consequences for the expulsion under Title 42, which has meant that you've seen a lot of repeat players coming back a lot, of repeat encounters at the border, the same people returned to Mexico trying two, three and four times. Under Title 8, if you're not successful in applying for asylum, then you're ordered removed, and the consequence of that is often a five year bar to re entry. And if you do attempt to re enter unlawfully, there are criminal penalties associated with that. So that's thought to be a much more significant deterrent to repeat attempts at entry. That that's not always been true in practice. The other important thing to keep in mind when trying to understand the effects of Title 42 is that it has not pushed out all other forms of processing. So by one measure, during the Trump years, 83% of encounters of migrants at the border were managed through Title 42, so these expulsions that Michelle and Adam are describing. During the Biden administration, these last two and a half years, approximately 55% of encounters have been managed through Title 42. And by December of last year, only about 25% or 20% were managed through Title 42. So that meant that a lot of people were in fact being screened through other mechanisms. 

So the picture is complicated. And the fact that only a percentage of encounters were managed through Title 42, I think, is reflective of this administration's ambivalence about its use. There are people who would like to see it used more widely, but there are others who would like to see it eliminated entirely. And in fact, the administration has been trying to eliminate it but has been stymied by courts and by politics. So it is, in fact, pretty complicated, though potentially transformative.

Michelle: I think it's really confusing for a lot of people who don't follow immigration day in and day out why we, you know, on the one hand, are reading about this policy, that's supposed to be a really effective deterrent for asylum seekers, and at the same time, have a record number of crossings. In my opinion, there are two basic reasons. The first is that, while it's a pretty effective deterrent for asylum seekers, for that sort of traditional migrant coming from Mexico, especially who's just looking for work, knows that if they make an asylum claim, they'll quickly be rejected. Those people, all they want to do is sneak into the country and be able to look for a job. And Title 42 eliminated the consequences for trying again and again. So you saw, you know, the same person crossing six, seven, eight times maybe in the span of a week, until they successfully sort of gained entry to the US. And that inflated the number of when we talk about, you know, there were 2.4 million arrests at the border in 2022 – that's not 2.4 million people, that's closer to like 1.6 million people, because so many people were trying repeatedly to get in. 

The other issue is that Cristina is right in that Title 42 was not being implemented uniformly. And part of that, I think, does reflect the Biden administration's ambivalence, but part of it also, it seems to me as though Title 42 is really dependent on cooperation from Mexico. This seems to be true with more and more of our immigrant issuing policies, and Mexico is a fickle partner. I mean, they have, at times, just decided that they weren't going to take back certain nationalities. They've decided they, you know, don't want to take back children under the age of six. So families with young children couldn't be sent back to Mexico under Title 42. That meant they had to be allowed to pursue their asylum claims under Title 8.  For a long time, the biggest nationalities coming to the US were from Venezuela and Cuba and Haiti. We can't deport them to those home countries because, you know, for example, we have no relationship with the Venezuelan government. And Mexico was like, “No, we're not taking Venezuelans,” and it took until this past January for us to strike a deal with Mexico for them to take back those nationalities – Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans. That's why sort of you see this really fluctuating use of title 42.

Paras: Cristina or Adam, do either of you want to react to any of that?  

Adam: I just want to agree with that, that it is true that the difficulty repatriating people has long been like a partial explanation for why the border enforcement and screening system looks the way it does, because when a person arrives, then you're not going to admit them into the country or hold them while they are processed and their case is considered. You have to figure out where you're going to send them to. And, you know, for Mexicans coming from Mexico, that's the most straightforward. But for all other people, you either need an agreement with their home country to be able to send them back there and the resources to actually transport them, which gets very expensive for the federal government quickly, or you need an agreement with some other country who's willing to let you return people were not their own nationals to their borders. And that's the thing that Mexico had long resisted. And as Michelle said, has, you know, sort of came around to accepting but, you know, has not had a consistent practice.

Paras: Yeah, I'm curious why the Biden administration continued to use Title 42.

Michelle: When Biden ran for president, he made some pretty strong statements that he wanted to reverse Trump administration policies, that he wanted to restore the nation's asylum system. Well, Title 42 had created the system for asylum seekers where if they asked, you know, the government just says no, and getting rid of it goes back to a system where you'd have to start saying yes to people again, and they were afraid that was going to cause this sort of extreme pull effect where tons of people were going to come to the border. They, I think, we're completely undecided on how to undo that. And it took them, I mean, a year and a half to even reach the conclusion that they needed to rip the band aid off and go ahead with it.

Cristina: Paras, I think also if you asked Biden administration officials early on why they were not lifting Title 42, many of them would say it's the decision of the CDC, it was a CDC order. It's not DHS’s prerogative to lift that order. And it's not even the President's call, because it's the call of the agency that has established that there's a public health threat that requires this measure to be in place. Now, whether that was a way of deflecting responsibility in an environment where there was no agreement about what precisely to do for the reasons that Michelle was describing is one question to ask in response to those claims. But, those claims do underscore how difficult it has been, and was, especially in the early years of the administration, to figure out what in the world to do about what was happening at the border.

 And we've each alluded in various ways to the significant new policies that have recently been announced. And I think it has taken two and a half years to figure out what those might look like, including because they necessitate the kind of cooperation that Adam and Michelle were both discussing with foreign nations. And so the strange career of Title 42 reflects the difficulty of devising a humanitarian asylum policy that is compatible with border control and the politics of border control in an environment where there are a lot of pressures on the border.

Paras: Let's talk about what comes next as Title 42 has now ended. This requires the Biden administration to take a stance around admitting refugees into the United States. And instead of adopting the Trump administration's approach – a very limited number of asylum claims – it's taking a more controlled path for asylum relief, along with harsher penalties for illegal crossings. Those who want to come to the port of entry and apply for asylum can still do that. But the bar for approval is higher and if they're denied, they can be immediately deported. 

There's also a newly created humanitarian sponsorship program, which allows people from some countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to find a sponsor in the US, and that allows them to work in the country for up to two years and apply for asylum during that time period. And at the same time, the US is creating these processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala. But the precise timeline is unclear. And CBP is rolling out this mobile app where people can try to schedule an appointment with an immigration official ahead of time, though, that's certainly difficult when you're fleeing violence, you might have limited access to the internet. So it still remains uncertain how well that process will work.

Adam: Today, people are being told by the administration, if you want to come and seek asylum in the United States, you effectively have two ways of receiving protection. You either are going to use our app to schedule an appointment, and that is numerically limiting the number of people who can get access to asylum because the app is only making available certain numbers of appointments. Or, you can try to seek protection through one of these parole programs by applying from within your country, and those are limited to certain countries, and again, those are kept explicitly and so restricts the number of people who can apply.

 An important feature of that system, I think, and an important difference from the way the politics of southern border enforcement worked in the 1990s, is that in the 1990s, Congress and the president adopted lots of policies that are quite explicitly distinguished sharply between people who crossed the border illegally, and people who presented themselves at ports of entry seeking admission. Immigration law makes that distinction, administrations made that distinction. And so for a long time, the idea was to say, “Don't cross the border illegally, present yourself lawfully for admission.” And the Biden policies represent a pretty significant change from that approach, because they apply equally to people who present themselves lawfully at ports of entry, and seek asylum there.

Cristina: The thing that I would add, Paras, is that it seems clear that what the administration is trying to do is to channel asylum applications away from these urgent, dire circumstances at the border, not only to the CBP One app process right now, I believe that that app only works north of Mexico City, but it could be expanded to work beyond that, but also for people to apply in their home countries. And one of the pieces of the new announcement was that the government was going to stand up processing centers, I believe in Colombia, and Guatemala, which could then be expanded to other countries as well, to encourage people to apply for these parole programs that the government is expanding from Latin America outside of the United States, preferably in people's home locations. 

So the virtue of that is that it tries to expand pathways for people without requiring them to go through the enormously dangerous journey through the Darien Gap, and through Mexico, Michelle alluded before, to some of the harrowing photos that we've seen of people trying to make that journey on the outsides of trains, and to reduce the influence of smugglers in the management of migration. The problem, of course, as we have noted already, is that that shifts who might be able to apply for asylum. It shifts the model of asylum from the person who arrives in desperate circumstances at the border, seeking entry, to people who have the time and the wherewithal to apply from their countries of origin or from Guatemala or Colombia, or who had to wait in Mexico and apply through the CBP One app. So the vision is more orderly, and potentially more humane, but it also potentially leaves out a large number of people who don't have that capacity or who are fleeing imminent danger. 

There is an exception to this new rule that effectively bars asylum unless you've applied in a country you've passed through, or used the app for people who are in urgent or imminent distress. It's not clear how often that exception will be used and, and that I think, underscores that there's a lot that we don't know about how this is going to work in practice. It could be actually quite effective and expansive of humanitarian protection, if it's well resourced, if there are available appointments on the app, if the processing is enters function well, and if people are able to utilize them despite fleeing violence or economic catastrophe, but all of those things might turn out to not be realizable. And so, it could be that the scope of humanitarian protection actually contracts, even though the administration is, through parole, trying to create more avenues for people to come. 

And the last thing that I'll say, I think this is also important for people to understand, is that these parole programs which use an authority that has existed in the immigration code in some form, I believe, at least since the 1950s, for the executive to allow people to come into the United States without having to get a visa or go through ordinary processes, apply beyond those who would otherwise be eligible for asylum. The asylum guarantee is actually quite narrow, it doesn't cover people who are fleeing economic distress, it covers people who are fleeing persecution on account of certain characteristics like race, national origin, and the like. And so the use of the parole power to let tens of thousands of more people in from various countries actually creates pathways that might not have existed to the ordinary asylum system. But again, it's shifting, who's getting protected, and moving the model away from the person fleeing persecution at the border, because they have no other choice but to come to the border.

Paras: How sticky are the changes that Title 42 created in the way that the US thinks about asylum? Is Title 42 a watershed moment? Or is it a one off because of the pandemic?

Cristina: I wouldn't describe the invocation of Title 42 here over the last several years as a watershed in the sense that this is a new normal. I would describe it as an extraordinary use of an authority that the likes of Stephen Miller had been seeing that they could exploit prior to the pandemic, but because of the pandemic it came into being. And the litigation that has surrounded it, I think, will make it difficult to use Title 42 for anything other than a true public health emergency. The Supreme Court's decision to stay the order of a little court, forcing the end of Title 42, effectively the Supreme Court's decision was to leave title 42 in place while it was considering the legal question – there was a dissent from that decision by four of the justices, and Justice Gorsuch in particular, joined by a Justice Jackson, wrote something in that case and said, Title 42 is a public health tool, it is not a tool of immigration management. And I don't know how widespread that view would have been on the court. But he was emphasizing, in writing a dissent from an emergency order, that that authority is limited to the context for which the authority was adopted, which is to manage public health threats. And so I think that that is a really important data point alongside the other litigation.

There's another, I believe it was the DC circuit, that allowed Title 42 to remain in place for other than unaccompanied minors, as long as the government created a means to ensure they weren't returning people to torture or persecution. And so I think all of that, if Title 42 were to come back, either because someone like Stephen Miller wants to combat flu or measles or because there's a genuine pandemic, all of these legal questions would come back into play. And hopefully, the experience of the last several years where the administration or the executive branch has elaborated other tools like the ones Adam was describing, like reducing density in congregate settings, would lead to a set of policies that wouldn't depend on something that is not only, you know, grossly over inclusive, but as we've all said, has led to people continuing to try to enter the United States and exacerbating the problem, because there are no consequences associated with it. So it's not that I remain optimistic about the future. I just don't think that we should take Title 42 as the lens through which we think about the future of immigration or asylum policy.

Adam: I think it's the legal question about the potential conflict between immigration laws, asylum rules on the one hand, and the CDC’s power under Title 42 on the other is, as Cristina suggests, raises a legal question where the justices’ views on the legal system more broadly, are also relevant, Right? So for in recent years, what we see consistently – and this is what Justice Gorsuch writes in this dissent, but it's what he's written and concurrences and majority opinions and other cases recently – is this idea that agencies are supposed to stay in their lane essentially. So when OSHA adopts a rule that says employers are supposed to tell their employees either get tested for COVID or get vaccinated, the Supreme Court blocks that order and effectively says, we can't imagine Congress intended OSHA, which is supposed to be regulating workplace safety, has the power to tell people they're supposed to get tested or vaccinated. And that idea, which is the same as the idea that Supreme Court articulates in, you know, this recent challenge to the Obama administration's clean coal plan, which is, oh, we don't imagine that Congress gave the EPA the power to tell the power industry to shift their generation from coal to something else, stay in your lane. Here, too, we could see the politics of that idea leading, you know, even potentially conservative members of the Supreme Court like Justice Gorsuch to conclude, yeah, I don't know that the CDC, which is supposed to be regulating public health emergencies, should have the authority to adopt broad immigration policies.

Michelle: I think the other thing that's happened with Title 42 is not so much a legal question, but a political one, which is, you know, we've spent nearly a decade fighting about the asylum system at the border, how generous it should be, whether there should be hundreds of thousands or millions of people using it every year. And I think the politics of that have shifted because of Title 42, where Democrats used to be sort of uniformly in favor of a really robust asylum system. You've seen a lot of moderate Democrats coming out defending Title 42, asking the Biden administration to extend it. And I think that's created this sort of watershed moment politically, where some Democrats are becoming sort of increasingly comfortable with this idea that the asylum system could be reshaped or could be right sized. Or maybe asylum doesn't have to be something that's open to everyone at all times without our ability to put limits on it. And I think that political shift is allowing the Biden administration to do what it's doing now. 

Paras: This has been such a great discussion, and there's a lot to keep track of, Adam, Cristina, Michelle, thanks so much for joining the show.  

Cristina: It was a pleasure.

Michelle: Thank you. 

Adam: Thanks so much for having us.

Paras: The Just Security podcast is produced in partnership with NYU's American Journalism Online program. AJO trains students to become world class journalists, no matter where they live or work. Find out more about AJO, and how you can apply, in our show notes. 

This episode was hosted by me, Paras Shah, with co-production and editing by Tiffany Chang and Michelle Eigenheer. Our music is the song, “The Parade,” by Hey Pluto. 

Special thanks to Clara Apt, Megan Corrarino, Adam Cox, Michelle Hackman, Alex Kapelman, Ben Montoya, and Cristina Rodriguez. We'll link to Adam and Cristina's piece, which analyzes what the end of Title 42 means for immigration law, in the show notes. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.