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Inside Trump’s Search for a Health Threat to Justify His Immigration Crackdown

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Inside Trump’s Search for a Health Threat to Justify His Immigration Crackdown

President-elect Donald J. Trump is likely to justify his plans to seal off the border with Mexico by citing a public health emergency from immigrants bringing disease into the United States.

Now he just has to find one.

Mr. Trump last invoked public health restrictions, known as Title 42, in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, when the coronavirus was tearing across the globe. As he prepares to enter office again, Mr. Trump has no such public health disaster to point to.

Still, his advisers have spent recent months trying to find the right disease to build their case, according to four people familiar with the discussions. They have looked at tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases as options and have asked allies inside the Border Patrol for examples of illnesses that are being detected among migrants.

They also have considered trying to rationalize Title 42 by arguing broadly that migrants at the border come from various countries and may carry unfamiliar disease — an assertion that echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that minorities transmit infections. Mr. Trump’s team did not respond to a request for comment.

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The plan to invoke the border restrictions based on sporadic cases of illness or even a vague fear of illness — rather than a major disease outbreak or pandemic — would amount to a radical use of the public health measure in pursuit of an immigration crackdown. Even when the coronavirus was spreading, the use of the health authority to turn away migrants prompted scrutiny from the courts and public health officials.

But Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers, led by Stephen Miller, his pick to be deputy chief of staff, believe they are entering a political environment that will welcome more aggressive border enforcement, particularly after some Democrats embraced using restrictions like Title 42, according to people familiar with the planning. President Biden used it to turn away thousands of migrants before eventually deciding to lift it, well after his public health advisers said the restrictions were no longer useful for the purpose of stopping the spread of disease.

Title 42, which is part of the Public Service Act of 1944, grants power to health authorities to block people from entering the United States when it is necessary to avert a “serious danger” posed by the presence of a communicable disease in foreign countries.

Mr. Miller has long considered Title 42 a key tool for his goal of shuttering the border to migration. He has essentially been on a yearslong quest to find enough examples of diseases among migrants to justify the use of the law.

Even before the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Miller asked aides to keep tabs on American communities that welcomed migrants to see if diseases broke out there. He seized on an outbreak of mumps in immigration detention facilities in 2019 to push for using the public health law to seal the border. He was talked down in most of the cases by cabinet secretaries and lawyers — until the advent of the coronavirus.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the White House, is responsible for assessing whether the public health rule is necessary at the border. And even when the pandemic spread throughout the United States, C.D.C. officials pushed back on the Trump White House’s position that turning away migrants was an effective way to prevent the spread of diseases.

Martin Cetron, the director of the agency’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, told a House committee that the implementation of the border restrictions “came from outside the C.D.C. subject matter experts” and was “handed to us” by the White House.

When Mr. Biden came into office, he initially kept the public health rule in place at the border, even when C.D.C. officials told his top aides there was no clear public health rationale for keeping the border shut to asylum seekers. Both the Biden and Trump administrations argued the rule was needed to prevent the spread of diseases in detention facilities at the border. But Mr. Biden’s top White House aides were privately concerned that lifting the rule would lead to a surge in migration.

During his second stint in the White House, Mr. Trump’s team will focus on avoiding such pushback. He is intent on installing loyalists throughout his administration who are unlikely to try to stop his more aggressive proposals.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2023, Mr. Miller sounded confident that the public would be accepting of Mr. Trump’s invoking Title 42. He said the new administration intended to use the law, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”

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Mr. Trump’s attempt to deter migration based on public health, even without a clear disease to justify its use, is just one expected piece of a flurry of Day 1 executive actions that his team is developing to crack down on immigration.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have also discussed declaring a national emergency to free up Department of Defense funds and move military personnel, aircraft and other resources to the border. They also want to revive a policy that forced migrants to wait in Mexico, rather than the United States, until their immigration court date — although they would need Mexico to agree to such a deal.

Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers received a briefing on such border restrictions — as well as the use of the public health emergency restrictions — during a recent meeting with homeland security officials as a part of the transition between administrations, according to a person familiar with the matter. After exiting a meeting with Senate Republicans on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump said he would close the border on his first day in office.

Some immigration experts have questioned how effective the public health rule was in driving down border crossings.

From the time Title 42 was enacted in 2020 until it was lifted in 2023, border officials expelled people more than 2.5 million times. Biden administration officials have publicly argued that the use of Title 42 at the southern border drove an increase in migrants attempting to cross the border multiple times, a practice known as recidivism.

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Blas Nuñez-Neto, a White House official, said that in that way, Title 42 “may have” actually led to an increase in border crossings that the administration struggled to handle.

The current state at the border has been particularly calm, especially when compared to the numbers seen a year ago. Border agents made more than 47,000 arrests in December, according to a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, a major drop from the previous year when nearly 250,000 such arrests were made.

Biden officials put into place a measure banning asylum for those who crossed the southern border starting this summer. It can only be lifted if crossing numbers drop to a certain threshold for several weeks, something that still has yet to happen.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.

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Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.

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Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.

“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.

The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.

ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT

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US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.

A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.

Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.

WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL

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RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.

In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.

Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.

VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD

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House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.

Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.

Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.

The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.

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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.

Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.

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Column: Trump decries ‘communism’ while his government takes ownership of companies

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Column: Trump decries ‘communism’ while his government takes ownership of companies

As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.

Then came Donald Trump.

Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.

In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)

“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.

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Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)

Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.

Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.

A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.

“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”

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“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”

Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.

“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.

Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”

And so he has.

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The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.

As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”

Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)

Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.

At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.

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One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.

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Who is Valli Geiger? Meet the Maine Dem that Platner urged to run for Senate

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Who is Valli Geiger? Meet the Maine Dem that Platner urged to run for Senate

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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.

While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.

After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.” 

By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.

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WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK

Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger  (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)

“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.

Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.

Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair. 

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Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.

The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES

Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.

In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”

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In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.

Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. 

Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.

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Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.

Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

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