Title 42 Isn’t About Public Health — It’s About Keeping Immigrants Out

During his first term, President Donald Trump issued a public health emergency known as Title 42 to expel asylum-seekers and other immigrants in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. President Joe Biden used the same tactic to empower U.S. Customs and Border Protection to block immigrants from countries with Covid outbreaks.

Now, even as his administration works to disassemble U.S. public health infrastructure, Trump is expected to deploy Title 42 again — this time to block immigrants from countries with recent cases of tuberculosis.

Experts argue there’s even less of a justification for invoking Title 42 now, noting the hypocrisy of using public health as an excuse to deny rights to asylum-seekers while systematically enabling the spread of disease at home and abroad. 

“The first [Trump administration], there didn’t seem to be that much concern over masking and getting vaccines widely dispersed,” said Juan Pedroza, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And that seems to still be the case now with the new Trump administration being very skeptical of research science when it comes to public health. At the same time that they’re saying they’re concerned about public health when it comes to immigration.” 

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Last week, the Trump administration blocked federal funding for schools with Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Earlier this month, the administration significantly reduced funding to the National Institutes of Health, halting $1.5 billion in medical research funds. And the administration’s cuts to humanitarian assistance have plunged global vaccine efforts into chaos, leaving millions more susceptible to disease. 

Dr. Paul Spiegel, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, described the situation as “ironic.”

“You have the administration pulling out of the World Health Organization and the pandemic treaty. You have them pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and there’s no question that climate change is going to have a big effect on where diseases are going to move and survive,” he said. “America is going to become less secure from a global health security [perspective], which increases chances of epidemics and pandemics.”

Even with the administration taking many steps that will make a global pandemic more likely in the long run, Spiegel said there is “absolutely” no public health justification for shutting the southern border at this time. 

The epidemiologist pointed to recent cases of outbreaks of serious communicable diseases in the U.S., such as the measles outbreak in Texas. The issue there wasn’t immigrants; it was low rates of vaccination. 

Erroneously linking immigrant communities to the spread of infectious diseases is, unfortunately, a “tale as old as time,” said Pedroza at UC Santa Cruz. “You can find in the United States plenty of evidence of people saying that immigrants are bringing disease and will be contaminating the nation, including public health.” 

Pedroza pointed to historical examples such as the screenings and quarantines at Ellis Island for incoming immigrants and the racist policies along the southern border used against Mexican immigrants. “This is not the first time we’ve been here,” he said.

To Amada Armenta, an immigrant rights professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Trump’s desire to invoke Title 42 is clearly divorced from actual health concerns. “Him wanting to shut down the asylum system is 100 percent not about public health at all,” she said. 

Despite the transparent nature of Trump’s efforts, Armenta said that connecting immigrants to disease has real-world consequences that ricochet past the border. “Whether he calls them criminals or people who carry diseases — which we know are not true — his rhetoric drives opinion,” she said. 

But the biggest price, if the administration issues Title 42, will be paid by immigrants and asylum-seekers along the southern border. 

“People have the right to apply for asylum,” she said. “And really, what this does is it just completely traps people in places where they’re very vulnerable.”