Why can’t states use public health to stop the border invasion?

Four years ago this month, we learned that a state has practically unlimited power to make decisions about our lives, liberties, and property in the name of public health. During the COVID-19 crisis, courts confirmed that states can enforce regulations like controlling our breathing, requiring vaccinations, closing essential services, eliminating jobs, banning religious gatherings, and even imposing travel restrictions between states. If a state can do all this and even block residents from other states, then why can’t it also prevent people from entering from places where diseases are rampant, such as Haiti and Western Africa?

In March 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott blocked travel from Louisiana due to early COVID-19 outbreaks, setting up checkpoints on main roads without any trouble from the courts. Four years on, the same Supreme Court justices halted the governor’s attempt to outlaw illegal entry into Texas. They did this by allowing a lower court’s decision to be paused, then subtly influenced the appeals court to reinstate the block, which it did on Tuesday.

Where is the public health juggernaut we’ve been treated to for the past four years?

Considering the risks from diseases originating in immigrants’ home countries, why couldn’t the governor use his “police powers” to address public health risks by restricting entry? Or is this power only applicable to Americans, making them second-class citizens compared to foreign invaders?

Earlier this month, a measles outbreak at a Chicago migrant facility reportedly infected 15 people. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2022, CBS News reported, the United States saw a record number of measles infections due to “low immunity among the thousands of evacuees airlifted from Afghanistan that year.”

We are told that vaccination — not sanitation or standard of living — is the key to preventing these diseases, and so school mandates have been legally justified for decades. Why doesn’t that same public health zealousness apply to bringing in people from places like Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and the disease-ridden western horn of Africa?

The law states clearly that any alien “who has failed to present documentation of having received vaccination against vaccine-preventable diseases, which shall include at least the following diseases: mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus and diphtheriatoxoids, pertussis, influenza type B and hepatitis B, and any other vaccinations against vaccine-preventable diseases” is inadmissible.

Do you really believe the hundreds of thousands of people Biden has flown in from Central America, Haiti, and Venezuela, in addition to the millions waved in at the border, have proof of vaccination? Mind you, that’s a federal law. Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1902, courts have held that states have even stronger police powers to mandate vaccination or place restrictions on those who don’t get them.

Even the few civil liberties wins we secured against the biomedical security state during COVID were at the federal level. The Supreme Court has declined to take up appeals to reverse almost any of the state-based restrictions.

States were able to implement restrictions by asserting speculative concerns about other states and certain classes of Americans. But what about foreign invaders from countries saturated with tuberculosis? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports the prevalence of TB among legal immigrants in America is 15.1 cases per 100,000, which is high enough. The prevalence of TB among Guatemalans is 106 per 100,000 people. In other words, Guatemalans are 83 times more likely to have TB than Americans and seven times more likely than legal immigrants.

“Many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB,” New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan explained last year. Even the California Department of Health concedes that “more than 80%” of TB cases in the state are from those foreigners. Since 2020, TB cases in California have increased 24%. Deaths are up 13%.

Astounding! Where is the public health juggernaut we’ve been treated to for the past four years?

Other diseases such as leprosy — leprosy! — polio, and malaria, which are not endemic to this country, are appearing in places like New York and Florida ever since the invasion kicked into high gear. The same with syphilis and hepatitis B.

Europe experienced mass waves of migration from Africa long before America, with the attendant rise in disease. The WHO has warned that as many as 50% of the world’s migrants could be infected with tuberculosis.

Remember, almost all the illegal aliens come up through Central America or the jungles of the Darien Gap, which are home to so many parasite-borne diseases. “Dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses cause mosquito-borne infections of increasing concern in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Dengue fever is endemic throughout much of Central and South America,” the CDC reports. Malaria, of course, is endemic in that region. People are also coming in from Africa countries like Guinea on the way to the Darien Gap, where CDC discovered a diphtheria outbreak.

Isn’t it funny that the same public health Nazis who viewed Americans as “vectors of disease” just a few years ago have no problem now with importing unvaccinated, unvetted foreigners by the millions?

Just four years ago, states violated Americans’ rights on the phony pretense of preventing people from overwhelming the hospitals. “Two weeks to flatten the curve,” remember? In 2023, the city of Yuma, Arizona spent $26 million, largely on emergency and neonatal care, including for mothers who traveled to have U.S.-born babies. Yuma is a small city with fewer than 100,000 people, but it’s shouldering a big burden.

The price tag, of course, gets much larger in major metros like New York City. Hospitals in Manhattan budgeted $90 million in 2023 on a care plan to house illegal aliens. That number seems quaint today.

Six U.S. Supreme Court justices in 2021 denied emergency injunctive relief to New York health care workers who were deprived of a religious liberty exemption to the state’s vaccine mandate. Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito would have granted the workers’ motion because of the irreparable harm they would have incurred in the pending litigation.

What about Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett? They rule against state-based immigration enforcement aimed at public safety but have no quarrel with states overruling human rights in the name of public health.

Not all public health emergencies are created equal. Or perhaps not all people are created equal. Americans are always last in America.