Pence ordered U.S. borders closed after experts refused

NEW YORK — U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence directed the country’s top disease control agency to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the U.S. borders, overruling the agency’s scientists who said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus, according to two former health officials. The action has so far caused nearly 150,000 children and adults to be expelled from the country.

The top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor who oversees such orders had refused to comply with a Trump administration directive, saying there was no valid public health reason to issue it, according to sources. So Pence intervened in early March. The vice-president, who had taken over the Trump administration’s response to the growing pandemic, called Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director, and told him to use the agency’s special legal authority in a pandemic anyway.

Also on the phone call were Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. Redfield immediately ordered his senior staff to get it done, according to a former CDC official.

The CDC’s order covered the U.S. borders with both Canada and Mexico, but has mostly affected the thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants arriving at the southern border. Public-health experts had urged the administration to focus on a national mask mandate, enforce social-distancing and increase the number of contact tracers.

But Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Donald Trump who has been a vocal opponent of immigration, pushed for the expulsion order.

“That was a Stephen Miller special. He was all over that,” said Olivia Troye, a former top aide to Pence, who co-ordinated the White House coronavirus task force and recently resigned.

Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act gives federal health officials unique powers during a pandemic to take extraordinary measures to limit transmission of an infectious disease. One is the ability to stop immigration from countries with high numbers of confirmed cases.

Public-health experts say the administration’s pattern of dismissing science-based decision making in favour of political goals has endangered many, including President Donald Trump himself, who is in hospital with the coronavirus.

“The decision to halt asylum processes ‘to protect the public health’ is not based on evidence or science,” wrote Dr. Anthony So, an international public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a letter to Redfield in April. “This order directly endangers tens of thousands of lives and threatens to amplify dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia.”

Since the order went into effect on March 20, nearly 150,000 people — including at least 8,800 unaccompanied children who are normally afforded special legal protections — have been sent back to their countries of origin without typical due process. Many have been returned to dangerous and violent conditions in Central America.

Pence’s spokeswoman Katie Miller, who is Stephen Miller’s wife, called the account of the phone call “false.”