Donald Trump’s nominee for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director may have an unexpected role in the coming months: assisting the incoming president with closing the U.S.-Mexico border to migrants.
Trump and his advisers are reportedly considering using a public health emergency as an excuse to close borders. The catch? The decision on whether or not a disease warrants a border closure falls to the CDC. This caused issues for Trump in 2020, when his administration wanted to use COVID-19 as a reason to close the southern border.
Luckily for Trump, his new nominee for CDC director, Dave Weldon, appears to share his feelings about immigration. Weldon didn’t respond to a request for comment. However, his campaign website from when he ran for Florida House of Representatives in 2024 describes his goals for immigration policy in Florida.
“I have always supported strong border security to stop illegal immigration. I will never allow Florida to become a sanctuary state. While Congress fails to secure the border, the Florida Legislature must keep Floridians safe from illegal immigrants. I will give law enforcement the tools they need to enforce the rule of law,” Weldon’s website states.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a question about whether Weldon’s views on immigration were considered during the CDC director nomination process.
Weldon may soon have the power to decide on immigration policy for not just Florida, but the entire country. Under a 1944 law known as Title 42, the CDC can decide that “the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country” justifies prohibiting immigration in the name of public health.
But former CDC Director Tom Frieden told NOTUS that he feels there has been a “misunderstanding of the role of the CDC in general.” The function of the CDC is to provide information to policymakers so that they can understand the health effects of those policies, Frieden said.
“Policy decisions are generally made by policymakers. The CDC director is not by nature a policymaker,” he added.
Frieden also emphasized that ultimately, diseases like COVID-19 don’t respect borders.
“Even if you cut down on immigration, we’re all connected by the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Whether it’s businesspeople or tourists traveling around the world and coming back with malaria or mpox or the next pandemic that spreads inexorably around the world, if we turn our back from the world, we’re increasing the risk to the U.S. The U.S. will be less safe,” Frieden said.
A spokesperson for the CDC declined to discuss the role the agency could play in calling for any future border closures, saying only that the “CDC cannot predict or theorize how or if Title 42 would be used in the future.”
Unlike some of Trump’s other cabinet nominees, Weldon has managed to avoid the spotlight since the announcement of his nomination in November. A physician and member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2009, he made a name for himself as an anti-vaccine advocate and by introducing legislation that barred federal health care programs from requiring health care entities to perform abortions.
But during his time in Congress, Weldon sponsored a number of bills targeting immigration, including a predecessor to Trump’s 2017 travel ban for visitors from Muslim-majority countries.
“United States border security agencies are presently overwhelmed with more than 400 million visits across our borders each year and safeguards need to be put in place to make our borders more secure,” begins Weldon’s 2002 bill, titled the Terrorist Admission Prevention Act.
The bill goes on to propose a moratorium on awarding U.S. visas to applicants from eight countries it considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” including Afghanistan, Lebanon and Egypt.
If Weldon is confirmed as the CDC director, his views on immigration could help Trump and his main immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, as they search for a public health-related excuse to close the border.
Miller has reportedly long searched for a disease concerning enough to justify migrant expulsions. But even in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists at the CDC opposed his and Trump’s decision to use COVID-19 as a reason to close the southern border. The head of CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, Martin Cetron, told a House select subcommittee in 2022 that the order to close the border was not drafted by his team, but rather “handed” to them from “outside the CDC subject matter experts” and that he had asked Robert Redfield, who was then the director of the CDC, to excuse him from the process of determining whether the pandemic warranted a border closure.
Ultimately, it reportedly took a direct call from Vice President Mike Pence to Redfield to get Redfield to authorize the use of the public health emergency to justify the Title 42 border closure in March 2020. It was the first time the law was used to close the border since it was passed in 1944.
The Trump administration did not want to have to strong-arm the CDC into issuing the Title 42 order in 2020. Trump described the order as originating with the CDC, saying at a March 2020 briefing that the CDC had decided to “exercise its authority” to “give Customs and Border Protection the tools it needs to prevent the transmission of the virus coming through both the northern and the southern border.” Pence’s team denied that he was involved in pressuring the CDC to issue the order.
One public health expert told NOTUS that closing borders is generally not an effective disease-mitigation strategy since it’s often done after the disease has already spread. The biggest public health impact the 2020 order had, he said, was to the CDC itself.
“There’s no doubt that it damaged the CDC’s reputation, not just within the broader public health community, but among the American people who were looking for sound, scientifically based guidance on COVID,” said Joseph Amon, director of the Bloomberg School’s Center for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University.
He added that if another Title 42 order were to be issued by the CDC, this time not during a major pandemic, it could cause even more issues.
“I don’t think this will restore people’s confidence in the CDC,” Amon said.
—
Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.