US Deportations Are Exporting COVID-19 to Nations Unprepared for a Pandemic — CEPR

On April 22nd, President Trump signed an Executive Order putting a 60-day halt on the issuance of new green cards to immigrants admissible for permanent residency in the United States. This measure, coming on the back of other government measures restricting legal immigration, ostensibly seeks to protect the US from imported cases of COVID-19. But while Trump endeavors to block nearly all immigration into the US, his administration has been exporting the virus to countries that have extremely limited capacity and resources to deal with pandemics.

As the coronavirus crisis has unfolded, the Trump administration has continued deportation flights of undocumented migrants to Central America and the Caribbean, all while openly threatening countries that push back. The results are tragic and predictable: there are now multiple instances of the US deporting immigrants with active COVID-19 cases to countries with under-resourced public health care systems that are already strained by the pandemic. In doing so, the Trump administration is not just putting the lives of immigrants and Latin Americans at risk, but those of people around the world.

You can read the rest on CEPR’s The Americas Blog.

Originally published at https://cepr.net on April 28, 2020.