Over the past two years, the government has been over-vigilant in ostensibly trying preventing each and every case of Covid. The Biden administration has put a lot of faith in the Covid vaccines, praising them as a means of “returning back to normal.”
In the name of “curbing the spread” and “saving lives,” the vaccines were mandated for tens of millions of government employees and contractors, healthcare workers associated with Medicare- and Medicaid programs, and for the military. The administration also imposed a strict vaccine mandate, with limited exemptions, on legal visitors to the United States. However, illegal immigrants from around the world, tens of thousands of whom are crossing the nation’s southern border on a monthly basis, are not required to be vaccinated to stay in the country. If the approaches look like double standards, it is because they are.
According to a rule (pdf) issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday, the agency extended the requirement for all visitors to the United States to be fully vaccinated to be allowed to enter the country under Title 19. The rule says,
DHS will allow the processing for entry into the United States of only those noncitizen non-LPRs [Legal Permanent Residents] who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and can provide proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 upon request at arrival.
The extension was issued in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) belief that “vaccines remain the most effective public health measure” when it comes to protecting people from severe illness or death from Covid, slowing the transmission, and reducing the likelihood of new Covid variants emerging.
The DHS observed that “these restrictions help protect the health and safety of both the personnel at the border and other travelers, as well as U.S. destination communities.”
The agency allows for a few exceptions from the mandate, which are not explicitly named, but said to be “currently available with respect to COVID-19 vaccination in the international air travel context.” Presumably, the exceptions align with the CDC recommendations that exclude children under the age of five and those who have legitimate medical and religious grounds not to be vaccinated against Covid.
The rule was first implemented by the DHS on November 8, 2021, and allowed non-essential air travel of non-citizen non-LPRs to come to America, provided that the traveler was fully vaccinated against Covid and could provide proof of vaccination status upon request by the immigration officials.
Starting on January 22, 2022, only fully vaccinated inbound non-citizen non-LPRs were allowed to travel to the United States via land points of entry — whether for essential or non-essential reasons. DHS also decided that only fully non-citizen non-LPRs could enter the United States from Canada. The requirement was set to expire today, but was extended, because the CDC continues to recommend “continued implementation of comprehensive requirements for proof of vaccination for all [non-citizen non-LPRs] seeking entry into the United States, whether by land or by air,” as quoted by the DHS.
Meanwhile, illegal aliens remain exempt from the vaccine mandate since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to apply CDC guidance through its Pandemic Response Requirements.
The guidance explicitly says that “ICE cannot mandate individuals in detention consent to be vaccinated.” All newcomers are to be simply offered the vaccine: “If eligible, vaccines should be offered as close to intake as possible, but always within 14 days of arrival, subject to vaccine eligibility.”
If an illegal immigrant accepts the vaccines, he or she should sign a consent form available in English, Spanish, Bengali, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Punjabi.
Immigration officials are required to record the vaccination status of all aliens, even though it is difficult to speculate how many of them are carrying their vaccine passports with them.
The ICE is also required to “post educational materials in different languages about the COVID-19 vaccine to help improve vaccine knowledge and to decrease the number of detainees who may choose to refuse the vaccine.”
Already record-high numbers of border crossings are expected to rise even higher as the Biden administration prepares to end Title 42 — a Trump-era policy that allowed immigration officials to rapidly turn migrants away at the border and stop them from seeking asylum as a means of preventing the spread of Covid — on May 23.
According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as a result of the policy change, up to 18,000 illegal immigrants will be arriving at America’s southern border every day. That’s more than double the number of people border agents are handling now. That would be 100,000 people per week, or half a million people potentially crossing each month.
According to media reports (see here, here, and here), the DHS apparently did not care much about the spread of Covid when it was releasing tens of thousands of Covid-infected illegal immigrants into the country last year.
“The White House continues to dodge questions on why it insists that Americans mask up and get vaccinated while infected migrants are released into the country with flimsy or non-existent health screening. This is toxic-level hypocrisy,” wrote Immigration Reform on the matter.
