Iowa City lawyer: Iowa will have to wait and see impact of change at southern border

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – A policy change at the U.S. southern border begs the question: how will the change impact us here at home?

The change is the expiration of Title 42, a restriction that allowed the U.S. to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the southern border during the COVID-19 pandemic. Title 42 went into force in March 2020 and it expired just before midnight on Thursday.

“I think nobody really knows what the impact locally will be,” said Julia Zalenski, Legal Director of the Prairielands Freedom Fund in Iowa City, a project that pays bond for detained immigrants.

When TV9 asked if the change meant a few hundred migrants could make it to Iowa, Zalenski said it was a possibility. However, she emphasized that while Title 42 is gone, plenty of other barriers for migrants remain.

“Additional measures have continued to control and limit migration that have nothing to do with Title 42,” said Zalenski.

Zalenski said while she’s unsure what, if anything, will change with the expiration of this one restriction, she at least hopes that situation at the border will get renewed attention.

“I feel, politically, that there was a die-down of attention when Biden was elected,” she said. “But if there is one place to look where there is almost no space between Trump administration policies and Biden administration policies, it’s the southern border, right? Like, nothing is better there. And a lot of things are worse.”

“I’m thinking of other ways that the Biden administration has implemented—again, including some of these third country travel bans, including the asylum app, which simply does not work—that are keeping people from entering the United States,” Zalenski added. “There’s a lot of harm that is being inflicted on people who are trying to enter the country that has nothing to do with Title 42 or that will continue independent of Title 42.”

She added that even though Iowa is hundreds of miles away from the border geographically, in a very real way, the distance is irrelevant.

“We’re not far from the border because the border isn’t a physical thing necessarily, right? Like, it’s an attempt to divide people in a way that does not reflect the lived reality of our lives and just does not reflect what families in Iowa look like and does not reflect what people’s stories in Iowa are.”

She added, “There are no hard borders between people.”

Republican leaders from Iowa are opposed to loosening restrictions at the border. U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley has said the U.S. doesn’t have enough resources to take on additional people, and Congresswoman Ashley Hinson tweeted earlier this month “We need to build a wall.”

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