U.S. preparing for potential spike in border arrivals if Title 42 is lifted

The Biden administration is building migrant holding facilities, soliciting contracts for transportation services and deploying additional immigration agents to prepare for a potential unprecedented spike in arrivals of migrants at the southern border if a pandemic restriction is lifted, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials said Tuesday.

DHS is developing contingency plans for several possibilities, including worst-case scenarios in which 12,000 to 18,000 migrants would enter U.S. custody daily, the DHS officials said during a briefing with reporters, describing migration flows that would overwhelm the government's processing capacity along the Mexican border.

U.S. border officials, who reported a record 2 million migrant arrests in 2021, are currently encountering an average of 7,101 migrants per day, a DHS contingency plan shows. If pandemic-era capacity limits are eased, Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) short-term facilities along the southern border would be able to hold 16,000 migrants on any given day, according to the plan.