WHY THE US BLOCKADE IS THE WRONG RESPONSE TO THE EBOLA EPIDEMIC

Emily K. Abel

As the Ebola epidemic continues to rage in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, the United States responds with policies that align with the concept of “America First” but contravene basic public health principles. After withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) in January, the government restricted the ability of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials to communicate with that group. Severe cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) also have hampered the government’s ability to respond to outbreaks throughout the world. The small amount of money the regime has sought to fight the Ebola outbreak in Africa pales in comparison with the funds previous administrations undoubtedly would have contributed.

Rather than cooperating with the global health community, the administration has instituted a blockade. Despite protests and a legal challenge, the regime is building a quarantine facility in Nairobi for US citizens who have contracted Ebola. In addition, the CDC has issued a rule prohibiting noncitizens, including “green card” holders, from affected countries from entering the US. Andrew Nixon, a Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) spokesperson argues that travel bans are a “longstanding public health tool” to prevent the spread of disease. WHO, however, notes, “Such measures are usually implemented out of fear and have no basis in science.” Damien C. Tully, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, explains that although travel restrictions often reassure the public, “outbreaks are controlled primarily at their source through investment in surveillance, diagnostics, health-care infrastructure, infection prevention and control, vaccinations, and therapeutics.”

Travel restrictions also encourage distrust, stigma, and discrimination. The campaign by Los Angeles health officials at the turn of the 20^th century against migrants from eastern states provides one example. Although notorious for its polluted air today, Los Angeles once billed itself as a health resort, particularly for those with “lung problems.” Soon after the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a massive campaign to portray the metropolis as the Promised Land and circulated countless stories of miraculous cures. Boosters touted the opportunity to live in an exclusively White and prosperous society as an additional advantage. An editorial in a prominent booster journal was titled “The Right Kind of People.”

But the railroads brought not only the middle-and-upper-class health seekers the boosters wooed abut also many poorer ones, who became associated with “tramps.” Nineteenth- century medical experts had assumed that tuberculosis, the most fearsome disease of the time, struck all segments of society equally, but turn-of-the-century authorities throughout the United States increasingly identified the disease with marginalized groups. The California State Board of Public Health declared that the state was “deluged at certain seasons of the year with patients, many too poor to return home.” A particularly important “fact” was that “seventy-five percent of the patients dying of tuberculosis” in the state had low incomes.

Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 bred new worries. A recurrent theme in the writings of early twentieth century health officials was the failure of germs to respect class barriers. In 1906 the California State Board of Health complained that “infected strangers, living in dark and ill-ventilated rooms, eating at cheap restaurants and expectorating everywhere, will infect more natives than ten times the number who reside in good homes where care is exercised.” Unsurprisingly, the exclusion campaign focused on poor people.

The one major exception was the opening salvo, a 1900 request from the State Board of Health to bar the entry of all people with tuberculosis. Francis Marion Pottenger, a doctor who had accompanied his wife with TB to Southern California, protested that “unless the law will allow a discrimination to be made between the man with money and the man without, then such a measure cannot stand.” He later wrote that had the Board of Health’s quarantine bill passed, “it would have deprived Southern California of a great number of men and women who were to be counted among her most valued and influential citizens.”

After the bill’s defeat, officials sought to impose a quarantine by other means. State authorities sponsored a federal bill to discourage low-income people with tuberculosis from leaving the East, warning that California provided no free care to residents of other states. Charitable groups urged east coast branches to stop sending people with TB to the West and refused to assist those who arrived.

Welfare offices throughout the country historically had used settlement laws to transport nonresidents back to their communities of origin. Poor migrants who applied to Los Angeles charitable organizations were provided only with train fare home. An 1898 article in the Los Angeles Evening Express complained about a man with TB who was “late of New York, formerly of Russia and a direct descendant of Abraham.” He was “a little evaporated Russian with a perpetual whine and a silvery voice which sounded like a cheap phonograph with the rolls worn out.” His most notable feature, however, was “his nerve,” which “was something wonderful.” He had “coolly informed” a local charity that that he was too sick to work and needed assistance. The organization sent him to St. Louis, where he had family.” Although charitable groups claimed that they transported only those clients who were well enough to travel, it was not easy to make accurate assessments. The March 1902 case files of the Ladies and Hebrew Benevolent Society noted that a man they tried to send home had died when he reached the train station. Other people must have died en route.

Anxieties about attracting the wrong kind of people also retarded government efforts to provide tuberculosis care. The first attempt to establish a public sanatorium met defeat largely as a result of fears that it would attract impoverished health seekers. A proposal to enlarge the county hospital, housing the sickest people with TB, provoked a similar outcry. And a campaign to create a Jewish sanatorium elicited the complaint that the city would become “the mecca for indigent tubercular patients. Although both government authorities eventually established a broad range of free and low-cost TB services, Los Angeles lagged far behind East Coast municipalities

After the Great Depression struck, a vast number of migrants from other states began to pour into California, alarming health and welfare officers and engendering a new round of exclusionary policies. In 1936 the Los Angeles police officer James E. Davis organized what became known as the “bum brigade.” He sent 125 officers to the border to prevent indigent people from entering the state. The blockade provoked outrage and ridicule throughout the county, but LA charitable organizations praised it “for attempting “to turn back these hordes of unwelcome invaders.” Edythe Tate-Thompson, the Director of the California Bureau of Tuberculosis, was another supporter. Pointing to the plant quarantine stations at the California border, she explained that “very lax methods exist at the border beyond the examination of cotton and fruit for boll weevil and fruit fly. The lame, the halt, and the blind come across without notice being given them. It is to laugh when one considers the cost of illness, illiteracy, and delinquency compared with the fruit fly and the boll weevil.”

Health officials buttressed their campaign against migrants by claiming expertise not only about their physical status but also about their personal characteristics. George Parish, the director of the Los Angeles City Department of Health, described the typical migrant woman as a “drudge” and the children as a “happy-go-lucky lot” who “roam the streets.” Tate-Thompson employed eugenic rhetoric. “Having seen quite a good deal of these people,” she was “convinced that the majority of those coming from Oklahoma and Arkansas” were “primitives.” She doubted that “the older group” could be educated in any modern methods.”

Because the migrant population grew especially rapidly in Los Angeles, the metropolis quickly became a center of the anti-migrant campaign. The pace of removals there quickened. In 1937 and 1938 the Los Angeles Department of Charities transported approximately ninety clients a month (as opposed to less than four a month in 1913).

Health authorities participated actively in the drive to expel migrants. Tate-Thompson pressed the County Department of Charities to transport sick people and helped to arrange the trips. Medical social workers played similar roles. A social worker at the county hospital believed it was “so imperative” to remove the children in one family that she insisted that they could travel in the coach section of the train “in spite of the doctors’ orders.” Zudenka Buben, an official in the County Department of Health, discussed the case of a “non-resident American orphan boy, 16 years” who attended a tuberculosis clinic in 1933. Because he was “mentally delinquent” and a “food handler” and lived with his sister who had a small child, he had become a menace. The best solution was thus to send him away. “This boy would have continued to run the streets,” Buben later wrote, “and have become a burden on Los Angeles County had it not been for the quick action of the County Health Department diagnosing the case, giving him close supervision, and helping arrange the plan to have him returned to his legal residence.”

It is difficult to imagine the Trump administration paying attention to histories such as this one. Others, however, should view it as a cautionary tale. Whether or not travel bans work (and considerable evidence suggests they do not), they intensify prejudice, discrimination, and cruelty. We must do better.

Sources:

Damien C. Tully, “Travel Restrictions and Ebola Outbreaks: Public Health Implications,” Lancet, published on line, May 29, 2026.

“Kenyan Court Blocks US Plan to Open Quarantine Center to Treat Americans,” PBS, May 29, 2026.

Trevor Hunnicutt and Julie Steenhuysen, “Trump Seeks More than $1.4 Billion in Ebola Funding from Congress,” Reuters, June 24, 2026.

Sophie Gardner and Carmen Paun, “Ebola Response Puts Trump on Collision Course with Global Health Body,” Politico, May 30, 2026.

Sarah Owermohle, “Trump Admin. Shutting Key Researchers out of Global Virus Response Talks, Documents and Sources Reveal,” CNN, May 25, 2026.

“New Ebola Quarantine Rule Bars Entry of Noncitizens, including Green Card Holders, from Affected Countries,” KFF, May 29, 2026.

Emily K. Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2007).