As if the border crisis isn’t damaging enough, with 2.5 million illegal migrants having crossed into the United States since Joe Biden took office, now the administration is going to make it exponentially worse by unwinding the last Trump-era restriction.
The Title 42 policy, implemented by the Trump administration during the pandemic to allow border officials quickly to expel migrants on public health grounds, will be terminated next month, the CDC announced Friday.
Title 42 was the last tool border officials had left to stem the flow of illegal migration from more than 150 countries across the southern border. Now, they are anticipating a doubling or tripling of numbers to as many as 18,000 a day.
We know what that means. More secret migrant flights fanning out from the southern border to a town near you.
Already, charter flights to White Plains airport in Westchester have started again, after a hiatus following The Post’s report last October revealing migrant planes landing in the middle of the night several times a week, and unloading hundreds of migrants, claimed to be children, to be spirited away on buses to locations around New York and neighboring states.
Unlike before, they now are landing before the airport’s midnight curfew, and there are fewer each week. The planes are stopping en route, in cities like Houston, Texas, and Oklahoma City, Okla., as opposed to Jacksonville, Fla., where The Post observed them last year disgorging migrants.
Publicly available flight data show World Atlantic Airways charter planes began landing again in White Plains in late February.
On February 25, March 11, March 19 and March 21, World Atlantic Airways flights from El Paso flew to White Plains via Houston, arriving between 7.59 p.m. and 9.21 p.m.
On March 4, and March 26 World Atlantic Airways planes flew from El Paso to White Plains via Oklahoma City, arriving at 9:25 p.m. and 9:33 p.m.
It is not known who was on board, but these are the same McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircraft with the same registration numbers which were chartered by the Department of Health and Human Services and were observed by The Post flying illegal migrant minors into White Plains last year.
It is not just White Plains. Migrant flights from the border are traveling all over the country, as the administration tries to manage the deluge at the border by spreading the problem far and wide, turning every state into a border state.
With the end of Title 42, already record numbers are set to explode.
Even moderate Democrats think the move is insane. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have condemned the plan to nix Title 42.
Manchin described it as “a frightening decision . . . Title 42 has been an essential tool in combatting the spread of COVID-19 and controlling the influx of migrants at our southern border.
“We are already facing an unprecedented increase in migrants this year, and that will only get worse if the Administration ends the Title 42 policy. We are nowhere near prepared to deal with that influx.”