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INSIDE TRUMP’S SEARCH FOR A HEALTH THREAT TO JUSTIFY HIS
IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN
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Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz
January 9, 2025
New York Times
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_ President-elect Donald J. Trump’s advisers have spent months
trying to identify a disease that will help them build their case for
closing the border. _
"Donald Trump - Caricature", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)
President-elect Donald J. Trump is likely to justify his plans to seal
off the border with Mexico by citing a public health emergency from
immigrants bringing disease into the United States.
Now he just has to find one.
Mr. Trump last invoked public health restrictions, known as Title 42,
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the early days of the pandemic in 2020, when the coronavirus was
tearing across the globe. As he prepares to enter office again, Mr.
Trump has no such public health disaster to point to.
Still, his advisers have spent recent months trying to find the right
disease to build their case, according to four people familiar with
the discussions. They have looked at tuberculosis and other
respiratory diseases as options and have asked allies inside the
Border Patrol for examples of illnesses that are being detected among
migrants.
They also have considered trying to rationalize Title 42 by arguing
broadly that migrants at the border come from various countries and
may carry unfamiliar disease — an assertion that echoes a racist
notion with a long history in the United States that minorities
transmit infections. Mr. Trump’s team did not respond to a request
for comment.
The plan to invoke the border restrictions based on sporadic cases of
illness or even a vague fear of illness — rather than a major
disease outbreak or pandemic — would amount to a radical use of the
public health measure in pursuit of an immigration crackdown. Even
when the coronavirus was spreading, the use of the health authority to
turn away migrants prompted scrutiny from the courts and public health
officials.
But Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers, led by Stephen Miller, his
pick to be deputy chief of staff, believe they are entering a
political environment that will welcome more aggressive border
enforcement, particularly after some Democrats embraced using
restrictions
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Title 42, according to people familiar with the planning. President
Biden used it to turn away thousands of migrants before eventually
deciding to lift it, well after his public health advisers said the
restrictions were no longer useful
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the purpose of stopping the spread of disease.
Title 42, which is part of the Public Service Act of 1944, grants
power to health authorities to block people from entering the United
States when it is necessary to avert a “serious danger” posed by
the presence of a communicable disease in foreign countries.
Mr. Miller has long considered Title 42
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goal of shuttering the border to migration. He has essentially been
on a yearslong quest to find enough examples of diseases
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migrants to justify the use of the law.
Even before the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Miller asked aides to
keep tabs on American communities that welcomed migrants to see if
diseases broke out there. He seized on an outbreak of mumps in
immigration detention facilities in 2019 to push for using the public
health law to seal the border. He was talked down in most of the cases
by cabinet secretaries and lawyers — until the advent of the
coronavirus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the White House,
is responsible for assessing whether the public health rule is
necessary at the border. And even when the pandemic spread throughout
the United States, C.D.C. officials pushed back on the Trump White
House’s position that turning away migrants was an effective way to
prevent the spread of diseases.
Martin Cetron, the director of the agency’s Division of Global
Migration and Quarantine, told a House committee that the
implementation of the border restrictions “came from outside the
C.D.C. subject matter experts” and was “handed to us” by the
White House.
When Mr. Biden came into office, he initially kept the public health
rule in place at the border, even when C.D.C. officials told his top
aides there was no clear public health rationale for keeping the
border shut to asylum seekers. Both the Biden and Trump
administrations argued the rule was needed to prevent the spread of
diseases in detention facilities at the border. But Mr. Biden’s top
White House aides were privately concerned
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lifting the rule would lead to a surge in migration.
During his second stint in the White House, Mr. Trump’s team will
focus on avoiding such pushback. He is intent on installing loyalists
throughout his administration who are unlikely to try to stop his more
aggressive proposals.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2023,
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Miller sounded confident that the public would be accepting of Mr.
Trump’s invoking Title 42. He said the new administration intended
to use the law, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis,
scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a
general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and
conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”
Mr. Trump’s attempt to deter migration based on public health, even
without a clear disease to justify its use, is just one expected piece
of a flurry of Day 1 executive actions that his team is developing to
crack down on immigration.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have also discussed declaring a national
emergency to free up Department of Defense funds and move military
personnel, aircraft and other resources to the border. They also want
to revive a policy that forced migrants to wait in Mexico, rather than
the United States, until their immigration court date — although
they would need Mexico to agree to such a deal.
Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers received a briefing on such border
restrictions — as well as the use of the public health emergency
restrictions — during a recent meeting with homeland security
officials as a part of the transition between administrations,
according to a person familiar with the matter. After exiting a
meeting with Senate Republicans on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump said
he would close the border on his first day in office.
Some immigration experts have questioned how effective the public
health rule was in driving down border crossings.
From the time Title 42 was enacted in 2020 until it was lifted in
2023, border officials expelled people more than 2.5 million times.
Biden administration officials have publicly argued that the use of
Title 42 at the southern border drove an increase in migrants
attempting to cross the border multiple times, a practice known as
recidivism.
Blas Nuñez-Neto, a White House official, said that in that way, Title
42 “may have” actually led to an increase in border crossings that
the administration struggled to handle.
The current state at the border has been particularly calm, especially
when compared to the numbers seen a year ago. Border agents made more
than 47,000 arrests in December, according to a senior U.S. Customs
and Border Protection official, a major drop from the previous year
when nearly 250,000 such arrests were made.
Biden officials put into place a measure banning asylum for those who
crossed the southern border starting this summer. It can only be
lifted if crossing numbers drop to a certain threshold for several
weeks, something that still has yet to happen.
_Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting._
_Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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correspondent, covering President Biden and his administration. More
about Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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_Hamed Aleaziz [[link removed]] covers the
Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy. More about
Hamed Aleaziz [[link removed]]_
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newsletter. Gain unlimited access to all of The Times with a digital
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