With the pending Title 42 lift around the corner, thousands of migrants have been waiting along the U.S.-Mexico border for months in hopes of entering the U.S. to seek asylum, Miriam Jordan reports for The New York Times. 

"There has never been a public health justification for using Title 42 authority in the battle to contain Covid-19," said Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego. "It was an obscure rule … part of a multipronged effort to curb immigration to the U.S." 

Regardless of Title 42, slated to end on May 23, root causes are pushing migrants from various parts of the world out. 

For CBS News, Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports that under Title 42, "[m]ore than 12,000 migrant children reentered U.S. border custody as unaccompanied minors in fiscal year 2021 after being expelled to Mexico," per unpublished CBP data. 

"Expelling families under Title 42 had forced parents to make the unbearable choice of keeping their children with them in danger or sending them alone to safety in the United States. No family should have to make that decision," said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney challenging the expulsions in court. 

This is why we need broader, permanent border solutions that are not Title 42. 

And in the words of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Deepak Bhargava, CUNY lecturer and longtime immigrant organizer: "... [W]e must remember that there are real people behind this issue. We cannot take our compassion and our empathy out of the process. We cannot allow hatred and fear of political retaliation to prevent us from doing the right thing. Immigration policy is not just about immigrants — it defines our character and identity as a multiracial, inclusive democracy." 

Welcome to Friday’s edition of The Forum Daily. I’m Joanna Taylor, Senior Communications Manager at the Forum. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].  

DREAM ACT — To truly honor the late Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Congress must pass the DREAM Act that Hatch first championed back in 2001, writes Bernardo Castro, a Utah Dreamer and good friend of ours, in an op-ed for The Salt Lake Tribune. Thanks to DACA, "I have found the hope and opportunity that Hatch’s bill outlined — but not the permanence," Castro writes. "... Congress’s failure to pass the original DREAM Act, or any of the many bipartisan iterations of it since, leaves me at risk of being separated from all that I know and being deported to a country in which I have few connections and no memories." For the current court challenges facing DACA recipients like Castro, see our policy explainer. Meanwhile, evangelical pastor Reid Kapple offers his perspective on reforms for the Kansas City Star. 

VACCINATIONS — The Biden administration has now vaccinated more than 20,000 migrants and asylum-seekers in border custody as part of a COVID-19 vaccination campaign launched in late March, per Camilo Montoya-Galvez and Nicole Sganga at CBS News. "It is something that I believe is historic, because we are building a health system all along the southwest border, an area that has been historically neglected for years, if not decades," DHS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Pritesh Gandhi told CBS News. 

REFUGEE UPDATES — Starting today, an estimated 72,500 Afghans already in the U.S. will officially be able to apply for temporary protected status (TPS), per Andrew Kreighbaum of Bloomberg Law. DHS posted a Federal Register notice announcing the registration process for Afghans to get protected status and work authorization. On Thursday, the Senate "overwhelmingly approved" $40 billion in humanitarian and emergency aid for Ukraine, per Catie Edmondson and Emily Cochrane of The New York Times. The Council on National Security and Immigration highlighted the news in a new blog.  

Today’s local stories: 

• In collaboration with her mosque, Aminah Syed, a high school junior from Long Grove, Illinois, "started a clothing and fundraising drive to help refugees from Afghanistan seeking new lives in the United States." (Steve Sadin, Chicago Tribune) 
• Afghan refugee Hassinullah Niazy has recently settled into his new life in Providence, Rhode Island, where he works at nonprofit Dorcas International to help other Afghans "learn English and become self-sufficient through career and technology training." (ABC6 News) 
• Massachusetts has welcomed some 2,000 Afghan refugees as of March, including brothers Shakib and Waden Malikzai, who now work in the janitorial department as a part of a new UMass Chan Medical School program in Worcester that helps recently resettled Afghan refugees find work. (Tiziana Dearing, Radio Boston) 

FORSYTH COUNTY — Forsyth County, Georgia’s Black residents were once terrorized and brutally murdered under the guise of Great Replacement Theory before there was even a coined term for the dangerous conspiracy, Jonathan Weisman reports for The New York Times. "If those who carried out mass shootings in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Christchurch, New Zealand, showed how deadly such beliefs could be in the hands of a single, well-armed killer, the Forsyth County of 1912 showed what a more organized operation of terror could accomplish." Today, the population is booming and diverse — "now over 260,000 — up from 45,000 when the vestiges of all-white Forsyth began falling away."  

BIRRIA TACOS — For Salon, Joseph Neese gives his personal take on "Taste of the Border," award-winning Mexican chef and author Claudia Sandoval’s new Discovery+ series. "My grandma would be cooking up and you could smell the café de olla brewing, and my grandpa would be in his typical corner reading the newspaper," Claudia recapped in a recent "Salon Talks" episode. "Those are some of the most nostalgic memories I have of growing up on the border." And at the end of the day, Sandoval says, "We can all come around a good plate of food and have an awesome discussion about nostalgia around food, about how that food came to be." 

Thanks for reading, 

Joanna