Banning U.S. Citizens
Trump administration treats citizens and migrants from Ebola-affected regions identically
Meningitis hit the United States hard in the late 1920s. Thousands of people were getting sick nationwide each year and about half dying. The epidemic peaked in 1929 when more than 8,000 people nationwide reportedly contracted the disease. It was worst in the parts of the country where most people lived. Almost half of cases were found in the Midwestern states and another 1,800 in New England. The Mountain West states of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, with many fewer residents, also got hit hard: twenty out of every 100,000 people living in that region got the disease that year, a far higher rate than any other part of the country, though slightly fewer than those states reported the year before.
To combat the disease, federal government officials banned ships from China and the Philippines. “No persons can be introduced directly or indirectly…into the United States or any of its possessions or dependents from any port in China (including Hongkong) or the Philippine Islands,” the State Department announced on July 8, 1929. Officials claimed that the country’s ability to quarantine people had been “overtaxed.” A few days earlier, President Herbert Hoover had blamed “Oriental steerage passengers.”
Unlike the travel ban that the Trump administration implemented in the spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was underway, the federal government’s response to meningitis didn’t carve out U.S. citizens.
The Trump administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Uganda suggests that they are building off their response to Covid while modeling their approach on the meningitis epidemic of a century ago. Just days after the World Health Organization disclosed initial deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, the Centers for the Disease Control announced that most people who had visited either of those countries, in addition to South Sudan, in the previous twenty-one days could not enter the United States. The CDC order did not apply to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. Four days later, the CDC revised its order to remove permanent residents from its list of exceptions.
Four days after that, news reports indicated that the list of exceptions had been all but eliminated. The Trump administration planned to bar U.S. citizens as well if they had been exposed to the virus. The administration planned to send exposed U.S. citizens to Kenya for treatment – despite concerns from public health experts that a quickly erected medical facility could not provide the same level of care available at facilities in the United States designed to treat people infected with contagious diseases like Ebola. (A Kenyan court temporarily stopped the Kenyan government from working with the Trump administration to bring exposed U.S. citizens into the country.)
As it did early in the Covid pandemic, the Trump administration points to a public-health law for legal permission. The law, known as Title 42, authorizes the administration to suspend entry “of persons and property” from any country in which the Surgeon General determines a communicable disease is present. Though the Trump administration never attempted to bar U.S. citizens during the Covid pandemic, the law’s broad reference to “persons” would seem to open the possibility of barring U.S. citizens. A separate federal regulation, enacted by the Department of Health and Human Services, creates a detailed legal regime for officials to follow to implement a public-health ban. The regulation exempts U.S. citizens. It remains unclear what legal directive administration officials are relying on to bar U.S. citizens from entering the United States.
Public-health officials generally oppose travel restrictions. “Such measures are usually implemented out of fear and have no basis in science,” the WHO announced last month. Indeed, a large study of the omicron variant of Covid-19, which was prevalent in late 2021 and early 2022, found that travel bans were not effective in containing the virus. Rather than controlling disease spread, travel bans can encourage people to avoid government officials out of fear of forced exclusion. The Trump administration’s exclusion of permanent residents and U.S. citizens could also discourage medical providers in the United States from traveling to disease-stricken regions to provide assistance.
The federal government’s response to the Ebola outbreak may indicate a new chapter in its aggressive reliance on public-health measures to enact strict migration-control policies. Rather than continue to provide preferential treatment to U.S. citizens, the administration now appears to be extending its harsh treatment of migrants to U.S. citizens. The Immigration and Nationality Act, which governs entry into the United States, does not authorize government officials to bar U.S. citizen. What the administration can’t do through immigration law, it may be attempting through public-health law.