Donald Trump intends to invoke a public health order that was used to immediately expel asylum-seeking immigrants more than 3 million times throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Administration officials have argued that the Public Health Service Act under Title 42 of U.S. code allows authorities to block immigrants from entering the country without due process for their asylum claims despite federal immigration laws and international accords.
Title 42 was suspended in May 2023 under Joe Biden, but the president plans to revive the order to swiftly expel immigrants by labelling them public health risks that could spread diseases like tuberculosis, according to internal government documents obtained by CBS News.
The order, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, would be enforced by border officials to expel immigrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to their home country or other nations willing to accept them, according to CBS News, citing documents reviewed by the network.
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
Trump’s return to Title 42 enforcement follows a series of sweeping anti-immigration actions, from gutting the asylum process to directing federal law enforcement agencies to prioritize deportations and unilaterally redefining 14th Amendment protections for birthright citizenship.
The president has already ordered border officials to deport immigrants without recognizing a legal right to request asylum, which is protected under federal law and international human rights agreements. Trump claims that he has the authority under 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to ban immigrants who are deemed “detrimental” to the country.
Trump also shut down an app created during the Biden administration that allowed immigrants to begin their asylum claims and make appointments with immigration officers before they reached the southern border.
The administration is facing several lawsuits from immigrant advocacy groups, families of detained immigrants and civil rights attorneys for sending immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, suspending asylum, and freezing refugee resettlement programs, among other targets.
Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda who pushed for Title 42 during the president’s first administration, told The New York Times last year that he would invoke the program again to combat “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.”
In December, Trump’s White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was once again looking at Title 42 as part of his planned “mass deportation operation.”
Since taking office, crossings at the southern border have plunged.
Administration officials reported an average of fewer than 300 illegal border crossings per day recently, reflecting a 90 percent decrease from February 2024, Border Patrol chief Mike Banks told CBS News last week.
Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CBS Face the Nation on Sunday that he is “not sure” why the administration is “reaching for a public health measure” as part of his anti-immigration agenda.
The bacteria that causes tuberculosis is on the rise, according to the World Health Organization’s 2024 report for the United States.
In 2023, the most recent year for which CDC data is available, there were roughly 10,000 cases and 600 deaths, while more than 10 million people worldwide experienced TB infections that year.
“Just from the objective standpoint of TB and the risk of TB being transported across the border, TB incidence rates are high in the countries where immigrants are coming from, but they're not exceedingly high relative to other countries,” he said.
“I think, just purely from an objective public health standpoint, there's probably parts of the world where we have immigrants coming in that provide a larger risk of the transmission of TB than across the border,” Gottlieb added.
