A bicameral coalition of nearly 80 lawmakers signed a letter to push back against the Biden administration’s expansion of Title 42 and proposed asylum transit ban on Tuesday.
In their letter to Biden, Democratic leaders took issue with a recent policy allowing 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti to enter the U.S. each month under temporary immigration status. The policy also facilitates the same number to be expelled from the country under a pandemic directive, known as Title 42.
The letter elaborates, “While we applaud the creation of new legal pathways for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans modeled off the existing parole programs for Venezuelans, it is disappointing that these pathways come at the expense of the legal right to seek asylum at the southern border.”
The lawmakers also urged the administration to rethink its proposed plans to issue a transit ban requiring migrants to pass through a third country before allowing them to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously rejected a Trump administration attempt at imposing a similar restriction. According to the letter to the Biden administration, this attempt was rejected because it “violated well-settled U.S. asylum laws that prohibit turning people away unless they have “firmly resettled” in a transit country, especially not if conditions in the transit country are not safe.”