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August 14th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
US immigration authorities last month detained more than 200,000 people for the first time in 21 years.
The figure is the latest evidence of a steady rise in immigration during 2021 that has strained US humanitarian capacity and tested the limits of the Biden administration’s liberal campaign promises.
US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) apprehended 212,672 people in July, according to data released on Thursday, including an all-time record 19,000 unaccompanied minors. The total is a 13 per cent increase on June’s figures.
The causes of the surge are numerous and inter-related: ranging from the partial rollback of restrictive Trump administration policies, to the pandemic, to longer-term forces like war, climate change, and regional instability.
“It is complicated, changing and involves vulnerable people at a time of a global pandemic,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during a press conference on Thursday.
Migration numbers usually drop during the summer, but the pandemic and its resulting economic devastation seems to have offset this effect.
At the beginning of 2021, the Biden administration rolled back some of the Trump administration’s most onerous immigration restrictions like intentional family separation and the Muslim travel, while keeping others.
It hung onto the Trump-era Title 42 programme, which used the pandemic as a justification to immediately turn away most border crossers, even those seeking the legally protected human right of asylum.
More than 45 per cent of the total apprehended in July were turned around under Title 42, according to the figures, though the data reveals even this hard-line policy hasn’t deterred many from trying to improve their lot in the United States. Twenty-seven per cent of those held in July had at least one previous contact with authorities.
The administration has offered some carve outs from the border shutdown for all minors crossing alone, as well as a limited number of families.
The American Civil Liberties Union recently revived a lawsuit against the Biden administration, after the president announced in August he was extending Title 42 indefinitely.
The United Nations has also condemned the US’s recent practice, begun last week, of flying some of those denied entry under the policy back to Southern Mexico.
“Individuals or families aboard those flights who may have urgent protection needs risk being sent back to the very dangers they have fled in their countries of origin in Central America without any opportunity to have those needs assessed and addressed,” the UN High Commissioner on Refugees wrote on Wednesday in a statement.
“These expulsion flights of non-Mexicans to the deep interior of Mexico constitute a troubling new dimension in enforcement of the COVID-related public health order known as Title 42.”
As described in a recent analysis for The Independent, though there has been an uptick in migration across the southern, the seemingly perennial mismatch between the number of people arriving to the US and the ability to process their immigration claims effectively and humanely is largely a political choice.
The US hasn’t fundamentally altered its immigration framework for decades, and a 50-50 divided US Senate is unlikely to do so anytime soon, despite the Biden administration’s goal of passing comprehensive citizenship reforms.
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