Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is U.S. immigration policy.

With me to discuss the crisis at the U.S. southern border is Dara Lind.

Dara is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a freelance journalist covering immigration.

She previously reported on U.S. immigration policy for Vox, where she co-hosted the podcast, The Weeds, and at ProPublica.

Dara recently wrote what we know about the Senate negotiations that could rec asylum in the U.S.

for immigration impact, a project of the American Immigration Council.

Dara, thank you for coming on the president's inbox.

Oh, thanks very much for having me.

If we may, Dara, I'd like to start with trying to get an understanding of the nature of the

challenge at the southern border. As I understand it, over the past few years, we have seen

a surge in people crossing the southern border. The number of people

apprehended for crossing the border without documentations in each of the past two years has

exceeded 2 million. That compares with a number of less than 500,000 over the prior decade.

Why are we seeing this search? So there are a few things going on here, obviously. First of all, it's important to remember that it's still been a little bit

less than a year since the end of the Title 42 policy, which was put in place in March 2020

at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and was kept in place despite ostensibly

being a public health measure, was kept in place through last May.

So let me stop you right there.

For people who don't remember what Title 42 was or just sort of lost once we start invoking different sections of the federal code, what did Title 42 do?

So at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration identified a previously extremely obscure provision in federal law that allows the

...