Pence ordered borders closed after CDC experts refused

NEW YORK — Vice President Mike Pence in March directedthenation’s topdisease 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 nearly150,000children and adults to be expelled from the country.

The top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor who oversees these types of orders had refused to comply with a Trump administration directive, saying there was no valid public health reason to issue it, according to three people with direct knowledge of the doctor’s refusal.

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, theCDC’s director, and told him to use the agency’s special legal authority in a pandemic anyway.

Redfield immediately orderedhis senior staff toget it done, according to a former CDCofficialwhowas not authorized to discuss internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The CDC’s order covered the U.S. borders with both Mexico and Canada but has mostly affected the thousands of asylum-seekers and immigrants arriving at the southern border.

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

“Thatwas a Stephen Miller special. He was all over that,” said Olivia Troye, a former top aide to Pence, who coordinated the White House coronavirus task force. She recently resigned in protest, saying the administration had placed politics above public health. “Therewas a lot of pressure on DHS and CDC to push this forward.”

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 of those is the ability to stopthe flowof immigration from countries with high numbers of confirmed cases, a legal authority the CDC does not normally have.

“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 toamplifydangerous 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 under a court settlement and federal law — have been sent back to their countries of origin without typical due process. Many have been returned to dangerous and violent conditions in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

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

Miller started his campaign for the order by button-holing the coronavirus task force staff to try to get the issue on its agenda, according to Troye. The task force did not take the issue up immediately, Troye said. The CDC spurned Miller’s idea, too. In earlyMarch the agency’s Division of Migration and Quarantine, led by Dr. Martin Cetron, refused to support the order because therewas not a strong public health basis for such a drasticmove, according to three people with knowledge of his decision.

White House officials were undeterred. They turned to lawyers at the CDC’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and U.S. CustomsandBorder Protection. In a callwith the CDC’s senior leadership, attorneys for both agencies urged the CDC to use its public health authority to turn people back at the borders.

By mid-March, CDC scientists still refused to comply. That’s when Pence and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf called with the message to get it done and quickly.

An HHS lawyer then wrote the order and submitted it to Redfield, who reviewed it and signed it. Redfield declined to comment through a CDC spokesperson.

“They forced us,” said a former health official involved in the process. “It is either do it or get fired.”