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FOCUS: Build Nothing New That Ultimately Leads to a Flame |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 15 February 2021 12:40 |
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McKibben writes: "A couple of weeks ago, I said that the first principle of fighting the climate crisis was simple: stop lighting coal, oil, gas, and trees on fire, as soon as possible."
Author and activist Bill McKibben. (photo: Wolfgang Schmidt)
Build Nothing New That Ultimately Leads to a Flame
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
15 February 21
 couple of weeks ago, I said that the first principle of fighting the climate crisis was simple: stop lighting coal, oil, gas, and trees on fire, as soon as possible. Today, I offer a second ground rule, corollary to the first: definitely don’t build anything new that connects to a flame.
It’s obvious, of course, that we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow: there are, for instance, 1.42 billion cars on the planet’s roads, and, at the end of 2019, less than one half of one per cent of them were fully electric. You can’t simply force conventional vehicles off the road, any more than you can instantly turn off every gas-fired power plant. That’s why global warming is such a wickedly difficult problem: two hundred years of constant development with fossil fuels at the center of our economy has left all of us deeply entangled.
On the other hand, we do have to stop burning fossil fuel. Climate scientists have told us that, if we don’t cut emissions in half by 2030, we’re not going to meet the targets set in the Paris climate accord. Renewable energy has gotten so cheap so fast that the economics of such an endeavor are no longer insane. It would require an all-hands effort, grander in scale but similar in kind to the green-infrastructure program that President Biden has promised to propose, and one conducted around the world. But we have no chance if we simultaneously keep building new infrastructure for fossil fuels. If you’re already in a hole that would take a decade to climb out of, why would you dig yourself another decade’s worth of pit?
That’s why, as I noted last month, it was so useful to have John Kerry declare, early in his run as global climate czar, that he didn’t think we should be building more natural-gas infrastructure. (Coal is moribund, and oil is mature, headed towards senescence; it’s gas that still has potential for growth.) In a panel discussion that included the C.E.O. of Royal Dutch Shell, as part of this year’s virtual Davos meeting, Kerry said, “The problem with gas is, if we build out a huge infrastructure for gas now to continue to use it as the bridge fuel—when we haven’t really exhausted the other possibilities—we’re going to be stuck with stranded assets in ten, twenty, thirty years.” Biden, Kerry told the forum, had asked for “a plan for ending international finance of fossil-fuel projects with public money.” That’s a big deal: according to Climate Home News, “the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and its predecessor, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, approved around $4 billion for overseas fossil fuel projects over the past five years. Since 2018, the US Export-Import Bank greenlit over $5 billion for fossil fuel investments abroad.”
But, last week, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, ahead of her confirmation hearing to be the Secretary of Energy, seemed to offer a slightly different take. As the hardworking scribes at Natural Gas Intelligence explain, “Granholm signaled continued support for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Her responses come as one of the first indications of how President Biden may utilize what’s become a potent foreign policy tool for the United States.” Here’s Granholm’s quote: “I believe U.S. LNG exports can have an important role to play in reducing international consumption of fuels that have greater contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.”
That’s the voice of a decade ago speaking, the familiar tones of the Obama years. Since then, we’ve learned a good deal more about how gas really works—even used domestically, the leaking methane from frack wells and pipelines is enough to make natural gas almost as bad as coal for trapping heat. When you super-chill the gas, pump it on a boat, sail it across the ocean, unfreeze it, and pump it through yet another network of pipes, that brings a lot more leaking methane. But it’s easy to understand why Granholm is wary of changing course: according to a report from the European Union, the United States, under Trump, went into the L.N.G.-export business in a big way: “36% of U.S. LNG exports went to the EU in 2019,” and since July, 2018, when Trump met with then-President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, “U.S. LNG exports into Europe increased by 760 percent.” The United States has six L.N.G.-export terminals in operation; there are plans to have a total of eighteen.
In her hearing, Granholm said that carbon-capture schemes might be able to help the oil-and-gas industry offset its climate destruction. That’s both highly theoretical (America’s only commercial carbon-capture facility closed last week, due to the absurd economics) and highly superfluous, in an age when a solar panel can provide energy just by capturing sunlight, leaving no emissions to collect. Every time you build something new that connects to a flame, you’ve chosen not to build that solar panel, not to build a wind turbine. Every time you build or buy a new internal-combustion vehicle, you’ve chosen not to build or buy an electric vehicle. And, since cars and power plants are only occasional purchases, each new one puts off a solution to the climate crisis for a few more years or decades.
This principle—don’t build anything new that eventually leads to a flame—means that the Biden Administration should look askance at new pipelines. It has already taken care of Keystone XL, but the same logic says to shut off the Dakota Access pipeline (which is facing new legal trouble) and stop construction on Line 3 in Minnesota (especially during the pandemic). This logic means not building new L.N.G. facilities, such as Jordan Cove, in Oregon, or the Weymouth compressor station, in Massachusetts. It means not letting new homes and buildings hook up to natural gas. (Mayor Bill de Blasio just announced this plan for New York City, though full implementation won’t come until 2030.) It means stopping the construction of new gas stations, in favor of building out a network of E.V. chargers (and electric trains). If flame is a necessary part of our life for the moment but we need to douse it as soon as possible, then not building new bonfires is a sensible first step.
Passing the Mic
Cathy Kunkel, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (I.E.E.F.A.) has co-authored a report on the prospects for rebuilding Puerto Rico’s power grid, which was badly damaged in 2017, during Hurricane Maria. Since the reconstruction comes as renewable-energy prices keep falling and the Biden Administration pushes clean tech, it’s possible that the island could become a fascinating example of clean development for tropical regions. (Our conversation was edited for length.)
We all remember the fight to get power restored in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. What’s the situation like on the ground right now?
There is certainly much more public interest in rooftop solar and other distributed renewable-energy solutions. And people who are getting rooftop solar systems installed are now much more likely to be pairing those systems with battery storage, so that they can continue to power their homes in the event of an extended blackout.
But, unfortunately, this interest isn’t really being supported by policy decisions. The hurricane was used as an excuse by those who have long desired the privatization of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (prepa) to move forward with those plans, in a manner that has prioritized the shortsighted goal of cutting labor costs and eroding workers’ rights, not developing renewable energy. prepa’s plan for the use of long-awaited fema grid-reconstruction money, which may end up being privately administered, includes over eight hundred and fifty million dollars in new natural-gas plants, and zero dollars for renewable energy and storage.
There’s a plan to put a lot of natural-gas power there. From a distance, that seems archaic before it begins. What are the forces fighting for and against it?
There have been efforts to bring natural gas to Puerto Rico for many years, and this push was renewed after Hurricane Maria. Of course, there are private interests that have been pushing this, including New Fortress Energy, a U.S. firm that won a contract, in 2019, to convert one of Puerto Rico’s existing power plants to natural gas, and to build a new natural-gas-import terminal in San Juan.
Really good organizing work is being done against these gas developments. Queremos Sol (“We Want Sun”) is a coalition of environmental, consumer, and labor organizations advocating for a decentralized renewable-energy future for the island.
And, over the last couple of years, the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, the energy-regulatory agency in Puerto Rico, conducted a long-term planning process with significant input from civil-society groups and experts. The bureau ultimately concluded that renewable energy was the least-cost path for the island, and ordered prepa not to move forward with new natural-gas projects. So it is pretty incredible that the authority is still trying to advance these gas projects. And there is a real possibility that prepa could get its way. So this is a very active fight right now.
In the best-case scenario, what could a rewired Puerto Rico show the world about the potential for renewables as the mainstream, not the alternative, source of power?
Puerto Rico still has the opportunity to reinvent its power system in a radically different way, based on decentralized renewable energy. We all know that Puerto Rico is going to face increasingly severe hurricanes in the future, and that the ability to restore power quickly after a storm is literally a matter of life and death.
Around the world, there are examples of other places—Hawaii, Australia, Vietnam, etc.—that have made rapid advances in integrating renewable energy into their power systems. There are technical challenges to be overcome, but Puerto Rico has the potential to join the ranks of world leaders in this area.
The federal government is about to disburse more than ten billion dollars for long-term grid work. If that money doesn’t go toward building a decentralized, renewable-energy-based grid, there won’t be a second opportunity.
Climate School
Truly remarkable news: in a suit brought by four environmental groups, the French high court ruled that the government was not living up to its international climate agreements. “This is an historic win for climate justice. The decision not only takes into consideration what scientists say and what people want from French public policies, but it should also inspire people all over the world to hold their governments accountable for climate change in their courts,” Jean-François Julliard, the executive director of Greenpeace France, one of the plaintiffs, told the Guardian.
The science writer Peter Brannen has a better visceral sense of deep time than almost any historian I can think of. His account in The Atlantic of how our present moment compares with other bursts of CO2 in the long geologic record should not be missed.
Scoreboard
If you wanted one sign of a changing climate zeitgeist, I might nominate Will Ferrell’s Super Bowl ad for G.M.’s new electric-car initiative.
Sometimes a name really sums up what a campaign is about—so it is with 30millionsolarhomes.org, which is launching with a call for, among other things, on-bill financing for panels, which will take care of much of the sticker shock associated with the new tech.
A new report notes that Scandinavian banks poured sixty-seven billion dollars into the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris accord. As the report’s authors point out, this stands “in stark contrast with the generally progressive reputation of the region when it comes to taking effective action on climate change.”
The credit raters at S. & P. have warned some of the world’s biggest oil companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, that their ratings could fall, because the corporations “face significant challenges and uncertainties engendered by the energy transition, including market declines due to growth of renewables.”
Ireland prepared to join Belize, New Zealand, Spain, France, Costa Rica, and Denmark on the list of nations moving to ban oil-and-gas exploration on their territory.
Elon Musk announced on Monday that he’ll offer a fifty-million-dollar first-place award through the X Prize Foundation to whoever comes up with “a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way.” I hereby submit my proposal that we let standing forests grow ever larger.
A huge—and hugely important—new study from Harvard, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London, published on Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research, finds some startling numbers. In 2018, one death out of five was caused by air pollution—that’s more than the number of deaths caused by aids, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. In the United States alone, particulate matter given off by fossil-fuel burning killed about three hundred and fifty thousand people; by comparison, guns killed about 39,470 people in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The fossil-fuel industry is not just killing off the climate system—it’s taking people in enormous numbers.
Warming Up
Connor DeVane hiked the thirty-one-hundred-mile Continental Divide Trail, from Canada to Mexico, in 2016. Along the way, he talked with lots of people working on aspects of climate action, from civil disobedience to the municipalization of utilities. The resulting movie is free to stream online, and lovely.
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FOCUS: Mitch McConnell's Impeachment Speech Was Just a Hostage Video |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51778"><span class="small">Lloyd Green, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 15 February 2021 11:31 |
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Green writes: "The Senate Republican leader excoriated Trump - after acquitting him of inciting an insurrection. The GOP is lost."
Mitch McConnell. (photo: Getty Images)
Mitch McConnell's Impeachment Speech Was Just a Hostage Video
By Lloyd Green, Guardian UK
15 February 21
The Senate Republican leader excoriated Trump – after acquitting him of inciting an insurrection. The GOP is lost
 he Republicans’ twin losses in the Georgia Senate runoffs have bound Mitch McConnell to Donald Trump for as long as the Kentuckian remains in office. The ex-president owns the Republican party. The Senate minority leader? He’s a rent-collector in a banker’s shirt.
To McConnell’s disgust, so evident in his excoriation of Trump on the Senate floor on Saturday, moments after voting to acquit, he must labour in Trump’s shadow. Nationally, Kentucky’s senior senator is even more disliked than Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia’s conspiracy-mongering congresswoman.
Even among Republicans, McConnell is relatively unpopular, and unlike Liz Cheney of Wyoming he is unwilling to risk their wrath. McConnell suffers his own precarity.
The fact is, GOP senators who bucked Trump on impeachment offer cautionary tales for those who dare to cross him. By Saturday night, at least three had received home-state smackdowns.
The Louisiana GOP censured Bill Cassidy while the chairs of the North Carolina and Pennsylvania parties upbraided their renegade senators. Richard Burr “shocked” Tar Heel Republicans while Pat Toomey “disappointed” those in the Keystone state. Both had already announced they will not seek re-election.
But not all those who are leaving the Senate followed suit. Rob Portman of Ohio and Richard Shelby of Alabama fell into line. One more time.
What was once the proud party of Lincoln and Reagan is now a Trump family rag – something to be used and abused by the 45th president like his bankrupt companies, namesake university and hapless vice-president, Mike Pence.
If the impeachment trial established anything, it is that Trump risked turning Pence into a corpse and ultimately went unpunished. That hangman’s noose was built to be used.
Yet even the former vice-president has remained mum and his brother, Greg Pence, a congressman from Indiana, voted against impeachment. Talk about taking one for the team.
In the end, devotion to a former reality show host literally trumped life itself. The mob belongs to Trump – as the Capitol police can attest. So much for the GOP’s embrace of “law and order”. When it mattered most, it counted least.
Like Moloch, Trump has elevated human sacrifice and personal devotion into the ultimate test. His indifference to Covid’s ravages was a harbinger of what came next, his raucous and at times violent rallies mere warm-up acts.
When Trump mused about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it, he wasn’t joking. He was simply stating a fact.
His acquittal ensures that he and his family will be a force to be reckoned with over the next four years. Faced with a possible primary challenge from Ivanka Trump, the Florida senator Marco Rubio months ago lavished praise on a Trump caravan that swarmed a Biden bus in Texas. He was ahead of the curve.
Since then, Nikki Haley, Trump’s first United Nations ambassador and a one-time South Carolina governor, has twisted herself into a pretzel to craft a message that will keep her former boss disarmed while convincing donors to empty their wallets. Good luck with that.
Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are in a competition all their own as to who makes a better doormat. Among the 2024 presidential wannabes, only Ben Sasse has grown a spine. His chances of winning the brass ring are close to nil.
A church-going Presbyterian, Sasse got it wrong when he announced that “politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude”. The Senate’s vote says otherwise.
Still, McConnell’s post-trial denunciation of Trump had some value. On top of labeling Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the events of 6 January, he provided an invitation and roadmap for law enforcement and the justice department.
“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he’s in office,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet.”
Already, prosecutors have homed in on Trump’s strong-arm efforts to overturn Georgia’s elections. Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance, is locked in a death duel before the supreme court over Trump’s tax returns.
Talk about synchronicity. Just hours before Saturday’s vote, reports emerged of Vance having expanded his investigation into Trump and four of his properties over loans extended by subsidiaries of Ladder Capital, a finance operation that also lent to Jared Kushner.
Politically, Trump will likely hit the road for a vengeance tour aimed at those who opposed him. McConnell may yet emerge as another punching bag. And if Trump does, don’t expect anyone to have McConnell’s back. It is Trump’s party now. Everyone else is expendable.
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RSN: Will Biden and the Democrats Allow Medicare to Expand? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 15 February 2021 09:18 |
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Ash writes: "The Biden administration has the tools to significantly expand Medicare, but do they have the political will?"
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders debate in Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 14, 2020. (photo: Getty Images)
Will Biden and the Democrats Allow Medicare to Expand?
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
15 February 21
 pening a discussion on Medicare, I should begin by saying that I rarely disagree with Bernie Sanders on reforming the archaic American health care system. There are too many good reasons to support Sanders’s health care initiatives.
But over time, I’ve come to wonder if pre-emptively dismantling the existing for-profit health care system would be the most productive approach.
Sure, on paper, if you canceled the for-profit system outright and built your national infrastructure around a public system, the transformation would be far faster and more efficient, and the benefits to the country’s health and economy would be huge.
The problem is that in the real world, this always gives the for-profit health care industry and their operatives in Congress an all too effective anti-socialism, anti-communism rhetorical vehicle. Yes, that argument falls apart with any cogent analysis, but it’s brutally effective on right-wing media.
That leaves alone the enormous legislative task of dismantling the current system and constructing a new one. An incredibly difficult task for a perfect Congress functioning in a purely objective spirit. For our deeply conflicted, highly polarized, and totally dysfunctional Congress, it would likely do more harm than good.
Enter the perfect solution: Medicare. Medicare is an up-and-running, fully functional, decades-old, LBJ-era public health care system. It works beautifully, and the only reason it isn’t the dominant health care system in America is that federal law restricts its growth by limiting access to people over 65. Lift that restriction and Medicare becomes the dominant health care system in America in 5 years. That’s all it would take.
The for-profit health care industry is well aware of what it would mean to have to compete with Medicare on a level playing field. The 65-year-old age restriction on Medicare is preventing open competition, protecting the industry’s enormous profits, and literally keeping them in business, albeit artificially. Newly-elected president Joe Biden, as an act of benevolence, proposes lowering the age restriction to 60 years from 65. That would be a kinder, gentler travesty, but a perpetuation of enormous travesty nonetheless.
Upon further examination, Biden’s plan to lower the qualifying age for Medicare to 60, while it sounds tepid, will draw intense fire from the for-profit health care industry.
NPR in November 2020 published an article labeled “Health News From NPR.” Upon closer examination, the piece was the product of Phil Galewitz, writing for Kaiser Health News. The title, Biden Wants to Lower Medicare Eligibility Age to 60, but Hospitals Push Back, might seem a precursor to an objective report, but predictably, having been produced by Kaiser, it’s an industry perspective.
The gist is that Biden is being too aggressive, “the hospitals” won’t stand for the cuts in revenue, and Congress is too industry-friendly and won’t approve it – the final point being probably true.
But The New York Times points to a potential workaround in a December 2020 piece titled Becerra Supports ‘Medicare for All,’ and Could Help States Get There. As the title suggests, the Department of Health and Human Services could work with states to expand Medicare coverage. The counter-argument is that it would increase taxes. The counter to the higher taxes argument is that yes, it would increase taxes but significantly decrease insurance premiums, so that the average American would pay less, far less overall.
The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the inadequacies of the for-profit health care system’s ability to address the public good, particularly in times of crisis. It was never designed to provide for the public good. It was designed to earn profits for health care corporations. That it does well.
The Biden administration has the tools to significantly expand Medicare, but do they have the political will? There’s been a lot of talk about “pushing” Biden and the Democrats. A little bit of public attention and energy on Medicare expansion at this moment might go a long way. What the pandemic has taught us is that our lives do in fact depend on it.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Why Biden's ICE Is Still Deporting People |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58360"><span class="small">Belle Cushing, Ani Ucar and Jika Gonzalez, VICE</span></a>
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Sunday, 14 February 2021 14:06 |
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Excerpt: "Biden's 'pause' only applied to migrants who have orders of removal and thus are already slated for deportation pending any immigration appeals."
Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take groups of them into custody in June near McAllen, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Why Biden's ICE Is Still Deporting People
By Belle Cushing, Ani Ucar and Jika Gonzalez, VICE
14 February 21
Trump used an obscure public health rule that dates back to the 1940s to deport migrant children. Biden hasn't repealed it.
 n the morning of Thursday, February 11, an Swift Air charter plane flew from an ICE detention center in El Paso, made a stop in Miami, and finally landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, carrying a group of Haitian asylum seekers. Two more removal flights landed in Haiti that day, including one that had been delayed in Laredo overnight. Another flight had landed on Tuesday, and another the day before that. A sixth flight is scheduled to arrive Friday.
At least 50 removal flights have taken off in total since Biden took office, according to Tom Cartwright, whose group Witness at the Border tracks deportation flights.
On the second day of his term, Biden declared a “pause” on certain deportations for 100 days. That moratorium was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge in Texas, who this week extended the temporary restraining order for another 14 days.
But even if the moratorium had stayed in place, the flights to Haiti and other countries like El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras, would still have gone ahead, because Biden has not reversed a Trump-era policy that used an obscure public health rule to effectively close the southern border to asylum seekers.
Title 42 is a previously little-used public-health rule that dates to the 1940s. The 1944 Public Health Service Act gave the Surgeon General (later the secretary of Health and Human Services) the power to suspend entry of people or goods to the U.S. for public-health reasons. The 1944 law was preceded by a 1892 law designed to target cholera and yellow fever, and it was expressly written to apply to all travelers, citizens and non-citizens alike.
The Trump administration revived the law with a new interpretation: to give Border Patrol officers the right to turn away non-citizens approaching the borders with Mexico and Canada, even asylum seekers and unaccompanied children, under the guise of keeping out the coronavirus. Migrants expelled under the regulation are not booked into the immigration system, but instead are kept in holding cells for up to several days until they are released into Mexico, or put on a flight to their home country.
Biden’s “pause” only applied to migrants who have orders of removal and thus are already slated for deportation pending any immigration appeals. People expelled under Title 42 don’t fall under that category, since they never made it far enough into the immigration system to receive an alien number, or a credible fear interview, let alone a removal order from a judge. Most of the people on the flights to Haiti were Title 42 expulsions, according to DHS.
CBP turned away 395,128 migrants and asylum seekers from the southern border in 2020 under Title 42. Another 64,136 were expelled in January of this year alone.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that Title 42 would continue to be invoked. “The vast majority of people will be turned away,” Psaki said during a briefing. “Asylum processes at the border will not occur immediately; it will take time to implement.”
The number of people approaching the southern border was up 6 percent in January, according to CBP. There are over a million pending asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database, a backlog that grew during the Trump administration.
The ACLU has sued under multiple lawsuits to block Title 42 for children and families. In one D.C. court, it won a temporary injunction that would allow unaccompanied children to enter the U.S. and claim asylum—until an appeals court struck that down, allowing expulsions of children to continue.
It wasn’t until Thursday that the CDC issued an order stating that unaccompanied children had been exempt since January 30, the day after the appeals court ruled that they were allowed to expel kids. Families are not exempt, however, and advocates have reported removals of children this week.
The order is temporary, and the Biden administration—now a defendant in the lawsuit—will have to decide whether to keep defending the use of Title 42 against families.
Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney suing the government over Title 42, called the policy “unlawful and inhumane.”
“For those looking to assess how far the Biden administration is prepared to abandon the prior administration’s horrific asylum policies, the Title 42 policy and the ongoing litigation challenging the policy is where to focus,” he said.
Despite the CDC’s order, conditions on the ground remain confusing, with some border patrol officials continuing to stop children from entering, according to Jennifer Podkul, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at KIND, which monitors children crossing the border.
“We’re terrified about what is happening to kids right now,” she said.
Even if unaccompanied children are exempt from Title 42, meaning they can claim asylum in the U.S., Podkul and other advocates are concerned about repercussions for families attempting to cross, who may decide to send children across the border alone. “We don’t want there to be any sort of incentive that they’d be willing to send their children ahead to keep them safe,” says Podkul.
This week, a new CBP processing facility opened in Donna, Texas. A tent city for unaccompanied children is planned for Carrizo Springs, Texas.
Biden has reversed some of Trump’s nearly 5,000 changes to the immigration system. On the first day of his term, h signed an order to preserve DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that granted deportation relief to undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children, that Trump sought to undo. Biden halted construction of the border wall, and also announced he will stop enrolling asylum seekers in the Remain in Mexico program, which forced them to await the processing of their asylum claim in Mexico, and Friday announced plans to begin slowly admitting asylum seekers who have been waiting for months.
Those changes were welcome, but Podkul said, “it doesn’t convert to a change in policy at the border as long as Title 42 is still in place.”
Back in May of 2020, dozens of health professionals signed onto a letter stating that there was no disease-prevention benefit to the rule, which was “being used to target certain classes of noncitizens rather than to protect public health.”
That this move was a thinly veiled way to implement immigration policy under the guise of public health was made more clear by a leaked CBP memo on how to implement the new policy, which gave border patrol agents wide latitude to expel any noncitizen they encountered. As the government cites public health to keep out undocumented inmmigrants, people actually do cross the southern border all the time. Over 13 million non-immigration-related border crossings—including bus, train, and car passengers; commercial trucks; and pedestrians—took place at the southern border in December 2020 alone.
“Expelling people under Title 42 is a ruse,” says Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “There is no reason that the United States of America cannot facilitate a process to get these people to safety. No more excuses. This needs to happen now.”
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