Trump advisers hunt for disease to justify emergency border closure: report
President-elect Donald Trump's team is searching for a disease that they can use to declare a public health emergency to seal the border, reported The New York Times on Thursday.
Specifically, Trump wants an excuse to invoke Section 265 of Title 42, the provision that suspends entries through the border and summarily expels migrants during a period when the surgeon general has declared a communicable disease emergency. This power, which became a big part of Trump's border control strategy in his first term, was invoked at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and remained in place for several years until the Biden administration lifted it.
"As he prepares to enter office again, Mr. Trump has no such public health disaster to point to," reported Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz. "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."
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More broadly, the Trump administration is adopting "an assertion that echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that minorities transmit infections," noted the report.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the emergency suspension of border crossings meaningfully deterred illegal immigration. The libertarian Cato Institute has noted however that the rate of so-called "gotaways" fell considerably after the policy was rescinded in 2023.
This all comes as Trump prepares to appoint a spate of science deniers to key public health positions, most notably vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has baselessly discouraged vaccine use, and even compared vaccine mandates to the Nazi deportations of Jews.