Title 42 ends: Mayra Flores warns cartels will ‘find another route’ for illegal border crossings

McALLEN, Texas — One-time Republican border lawmaker Mayra Flores ripped the Biden administration for “ignoring the border crisis,” warning that the end of Title 42 won’t stop cartels from facilitating illegal immigration.

“They’re going to find another route. The cartels have been paid already, right? So they have an ‘obligation’ [and] they’re going to find another route and cross them into the United States illegally. It’s going to happen,” Flores, the wife of a United States Border Patrol agent, told the Washington Examiner Friday near her home in McAllen, Texas.

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For years, smugglers and cartels south of the border have sought to recruit United States residents as couriers to bring in large amounts of migrants, sometimes resulting in catastrophic demises, such as one fatal crash of a 17-year-old girl from Austin in September after she was paid thousands of dollars to smuggle migrants. In El Paso, the newest U.S. Border Patrol chief in that sector, Scott Good, is warning such recruitment operations are still a dire threat to address.

Flores, who is now a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, lamented that the end of Title 42 on Thursday, the pandemic-era policy that saw the swift expulsion of 2.8 million migrants on the basis of the public health emergency, coincided with record numbers of more than 10,000 migrants crossing the United States-Mexico border each day this week.

“[Customs and Border Protection] really weren’t enforcing Title 42 to the extent they were supposed to, and what makes us think that they’re going to enforce Title 8?” Flores said, adding it’s “not fair” for immigrants who are waiting to enter the U.S. legally.

She also lashed out at Democratic House lawmakers, including her former opponent Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), who unseated her in the 2022 election, for voting against the recently passed Secure the Border Act. That bill would resume construction of the border wall and limit asylum eligibility, though it’s unlikely to pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“He said he wrote a letter to extend Title 42, wanting border security, but also voted against border security,” Flores said, adding that border Democrats such as Gonzalez and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) “are not moderates.”

Gonzalez told the Washington Examiner Monday he backed an extension of Title 42, but remained cautiously optimistic that the capabilities of Title 8 would allow more deportations of people back to their home country.

“And I think that is also going to send a message to many people who are thinking that by coming into our border, they’re going to just make it through,” Gonzalez said.

Flores also accused the Biden administration and Democrats of wanting to avoid border fortification in order to build support from the Hispanic community for the upcoming 2024 election.

“They don’t want to fix this issue because they want to continue using the immigration issue every election cycle to get the support from the Hispanic community. Then, once they get the support from the Hispanic community, they toss them aside,” Flores said.

The transition back to Title 8 is intended to “expeditiously process and remove individuals who arrive at the U.S. border unlawfully and do not have a legal basis to remain,” according to a State Department release from May 10.

People who cross into the U.S. without using a legal pathway or failing to schedule an appointment time to arrive at a port of entry will be presumed ineligible for asylum if they don’t have an applicable exception. And if removed, they would be blocked from re-entry for at least five years and subject to criminal penalties for repeated offenses.

When Title 42 ended Thursday night, the Washington Examiner witnessed migrants camped across the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, which marks the final destination for many migrants across the world on their journey to cross through the southern border into Brownsville, Texas.

The Washington Examiner encountered three migrants directly that night, one from Cuba and two from Venezuela, while other media outlets videotaped a group of migrants wading across the river. Those crossings were still minimal in comparison to the large crowds witnessed by other reporters on the ground in other border towns such as Yuma, Arizona, where migrants lined up by the hundreds ahead of the policy termination

“The reason why we’re seeing a [lull] after Title 42 ended, of people coming in, is because of our governor, he put a stop to it,” Flores said, commending Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star program that deployed 10,000 Texas National Guard soldiers to areas across the southern border.

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Flores declined to say whether she would make another attempt to gain back her seat after losing to Gonzalez but said she would “always be a voice for South Texas” and stand for the Border Patrol agents handling the immigration crisis.

“Our Border Patrol agents are our family. They’re constantly being criticized for doing their job. And that’s what they’re wanting to do … but this administration is not allowing them to enforce the laws that Congress put in place,” Flores said.