For more than a month, under the guise of fighting the coronavirus, the Trump administration has used the nation’s public health laws as a pretext for summarily deporting refugees and children at the border.

This new border policy runs roughshod over legal rights, distracts from meaningful measures to prevent spread of the coronavirus and undermines confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s top health protection agency, which delivered the directive that imposes these deportations.

(Continue reading the op-ed on The New York Times’ page here.)

Lucas Guttentag was a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Stefano Bertozzi is dean emeritus of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.