Donald Trump’s inner circle of advisers is reportedly searching for a disease to use as an excuse to invoke a public health emergency, allowing his incoming administration to implement strict anti-immigration rules.
The New York Times reports that Trump’s team hopes to invoke a federal policy called Title 42, which governs public health restrictions on travels, as a way to effectively shut down the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump has spent most of his political career pointing to Mexico and migrants from south of the border as the cause of many of America’s problems.
The effort is reportedly being led by senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Miller has a long history of racist connections, including promoting white supremacist literature and racist immigration stories while he was an aide to former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
In 2023, Miller told the Times that a future Trump administration would likely cite “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” so that Title 42 could be invoked.
During the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the German government accused Jewish people of spreading diseases. This was used to justify antisemitic policies, ultimately leading to the murder of millions in the Holocaust.
The first Trump administration invoked Title 42 after the emergence of the COVID-19 virus. After this occurred, thousands of unaccompanied children were expelled at border crossings, sending many of them back into the dangerous conditions they were trying to escape.
A Honduran migrant helps a young girl cross to the American side of the border wall, in Tijuana, Mexico, on Dec. 2, 2018.
Despite this, Title 42 didn’t deter people from coming to the U.S. When the policy was in full force under Trump, border patrol records show that apprehensions increased after it’d been invoked.
At the time, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reportedly told the Trump administration there was no evidence that closing the border would help to stop COVID-19’s spread. But since it presented an opportunity to invoke an anti-immigration rule the administration had long wanted, the authorization came from then-Director of the CDC Robert Redfield after then-Vice President Mike Pence told him to do so.
Following along with the strategy laid out by the conservative policy document Project 2025, the upcoming Trump administration intends to install loyalists at agencies like the CDC, which would remove current checks and balances from the system.
The Biden administration eventually ended Title 42 in May 2023, while earlier curtailing many of the harshest immigration policies from the Trump era.
But Trump’s anti-immigrant zeal clearly sees no need for a true medical crisis to invoke the powers he has always wanted at his disposal.
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