Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Supreme Court prolongs Title 42 and Biden expands it, Arizona "container wall" goes down - WOLA

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : I'm going to be making a speech tomorrow on border security, and you'll hear more about it tomorrow."
53% : "Given the protests," EFE reported, "COMAR officials advised the migrants that -- for the moment -- they will only attend to families with children, with the remaining adults having to wait their turn in line" to apply for asylum.
51% : COMAR's director, Andrés Ramírez, tweeted that 118,478 people applied for asylum in Mexico in 2022, the agency's second-largest total after 2021 and 91 times what its workload was in 2013.
50% : They are demanding either faster attention to their requests for asylum in Mexico's system, or documents allowing them to remain in Mexico long enough to transit to the U.S. border.
49% :The week before, Gov. Abbott had ordered Texas National Guardsmen to respond to an increase in asylum seeking migration in El Paso (discussed in WOLA's December 16 Border Update) by laying miles of concertina wire along the Rio Grande.
47% :Removal operations have begun in border zones where Arizona's Republican governor, whose term ended on January 1, had placed miles of shipping containers along border wall gaps.
47% : The containers did not stop asylum seekers, who were already on U.S. soil and turned themselves in to Border Patrol elsewhere.
47% : The razor-sharp barrier does not prevent migrants from turning themselves in to U.S. authorities to seek asylum -- they merely need to be standing on U.S. soil to do so.
46% : The expulsions occur regardless of migrants' expressed need to apply for asylum.
46% : As the expanded Title 42 expulsions represent a new block to the legal right to seek asylum in the United States, human rights advocates had responded with alarm to a December 28 revelation, in a story broken by Reuters, that it might happen.
46% : The administration's announcement also foresees a new rule subjecting asylum seekers to "a rebuttable presumption of asylum ineligibility," with to-be-determined exceptions, if they passed through third countries en route to the border and did not seek asylum in those countries.
45% : The Republican governor had first started stacking containers along gaps in the border wall near Yuma in August, at sites where thousands of asylum seeking migrants were arriving and turning themselves in to Border Patrol.
43% : Upon news of the Supreme Court's prolongation, many made the desperate decision to cross the border anyway into El Paso, Texas, avoiding Border Patrol apprehension and inspection.
40% : Hundreds of homeless migrants who had never been in U.S. custody began congregating in south El Paso, near downtown, where Border Patrol has begun apprehending them, and presumably expelling them.

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