The Trump administration is planning to revive a pandemic-era Title 42 policy to swiftly turn migrants away at the US border on the grounds they could potentially spread diseases like tuberculosis, a new report says.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently preparing to issue the order that would allow border officials to label illegal migrants as public health risks, CBS News reported, citing internal documents.
It wasn’t immediately clear when the measure would be implemented, but the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are said to have been prepping for the policy change.
The health measure would reinstate the policy put in place by President Trump back in 2020 in a push to boot migrants at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former President Biden kept Title 42 in place when he first took office but later scrapped it when he declared an end to the public health emergency tied to the pandemic in May 2023.
The apparent revival of Title 42 comes amid Trump’s widespread crackdown on illegal migrants — a key campaign promise — continues to unfold and ICE faces increasing pressure from the White House to ramp up migrant arrests and deportations.
It wasn’t known how the planned health-based measure would work alongside Trump’s other border policies.
Meanwhile, the number of migrant encounters at the border has dropped considerably since Trump returned to the White House.
Earlier this month, just 396 illegal migrants were encountered across the once-bustling El Paso, Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Del Rio and Big Bend sections of the southwest border on Feb. 5.
Del Rio alone was seeing thousands of illegal crossings per day under the Biden administration — including a spike in September, 2021 when more than 14,000 Haitian migrants appeared at the border over a matter of days.
