The response to the coronavirus pandemic has opened up new avenues for President Donald Trump to advance his anti-immigration goals.

In addition to the cruel affects the administration's policies have on migrants, they are now spreading infection by creating four burgeoning hot zones for outbreaks of COVID-19.

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Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has complained that on immigration, the United States has "the worst laws of any country in the world," which constrain his anti-immigrant agenda at the border with Mexico.

He hasn't been able to convince Congress to change those laws, or even to pay for a wall along the southern border, even after instigating the longest government shutdown in history just to pressure Congress.

Trump's administration has instead sought to chip away at immigration statutes and bend them almost to their breaking point, in order to make it harder for all immigrants, but primarily asylum-seekers, to enter the United States.

This campaign, led by White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, has included controversial measures like "Remain in Mexico," which forces 60,000 non-Mexican asylum-seekers to await their US asylum hearings in Mexican border towns. Last summer, the administration banned asylum for anyone who traveled through another country and didn't seek it there first. As a result of these policies, the rights of most individuals to seek asylum at the US border have been effectively abrogated, pending the outcome of legal challenges that are slowly winding their way through the appeals system.

A Honduran migrant in a mask waits in line to plead for asylum at the El Caparrel border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, March 2, 2020. Getty Images/Sandy Huffaker

Then came the coronavirus pandemic, which the administration has seized on as a pretext to enact more of its immigration restrictions, without regard to Congress, the courts or public opinion. COVID-19 has effectively shown what the administration's vision for the US border would look like if it were given free rein.

Under an obscure provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act, migrants without documents are either being turned away at border crossings or detained and sent right back to Mexico without any processing. This applies to asylum-seekers, in open violation of the 1980 Refugee Act. It also applies to unaccompanied children, in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2000. By sending Central Americans back across the southern border, the administration is also compelling Mexico to take in non-citizens against its will.

Trump's new border crackdown goes beyond expulsions. Non-Mexican asylum-seekers who are subject to the "Remain in Mexico" policy have seen their US court hearings postponed for months. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to deport migrants every day from its giant network of mostly privately run detention centers. Border wall construction—three-quarters of which is being funded by diverted money from the Pentagon's budget—is ongoing. And in late March, the Pentagon announced it would send hundreds more active-duty soldiers to the border to bolster one of the longest deployments on US soil since Reconstruction.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to apply pressure on Mexico to crack down on migrants traveling through its territory, even though human rights advocates have sounded alarms about the gratuitous use of force by security officers in crowded Mexican detention facilities.

Central American migrants wait to request asylum in the US, outside the El Chaparral port of entry building at the US-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, April 30, 2018. Associated Press/Hans-Maximo Musielik

As a result of these obstacles, and due to the sheer difficulty of transiting through Central America and Mexico during a pandemic, fewer people are crossing the southern border. In early May, US authorities are expected to release updated figures showing a record drop in undocumented immigration for April.

Expect a celebratory tweet from the president. But don't expect the drop to last long. A massive wave of migration throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, from Venezuela to Haiti to Honduras, is still being driven by violence, extreme poverty and misrule. New and harsher tactics at the southern border will only pause this migration flow temporarily.

Yet the damage is already being done. In addition to their cruel impacts on the lives of migrants, the administration's policies are spreading infection by creating four burgeoning hot zones for outbreaks of COVID-19.

The first is Mexican border cities, which were never safe even before the pandemic. Migrants who are being expelled and deported there are joining the ranks of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers who are waiting for their day in US court.

This diverse population, including Central Americans, Cubans, Haitians, Brazilians and Mexicans, cannot practice social distancing. They are jammed together in substandard housing, in charity-run shelters—some of which are closing or limiting access during the pandemic—and even in tent cities like the 2,000-person encampment in Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. They could hardly be more vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19.

Migrants at an encampment of more than 2,000 people seeking asylum in the US, amid the coronavirus outbreak, in Matamoros, Mexico, March 20, 2020. Daniel Becerril/Reuters

The second hot zone is ICE's network of detention centers, which as of mid-April are holding about 32,000 migrants, including about 5,600 asylum-seekers.

Approximately half of the detainee population have no criminal history. People in these facilities sleep in dormitories, in bunk beds just feet apart. They eat in the same cafeterias. Some have to buy their own soap in the commissaries run by the corporations that manage the facilities. Many are unable to obtain masks.

Among the migrants stuck in Mexican border towns and ICE facilities, a majority of them have relatives and support networks to sponsor them in the United States, with whom they could stay and socially distance themselves. ICE has broad discretion to release them into the United States to await their hearings.

Perfectly good models of "alternatives to detention" programs already exist to keep them from slipping through the cracks. But the Trump administration, in its anti-immigrant zeal, appears willing to subject migrants to a public health disaster.

A communal area at the Adelanto immigration detention center, which is run by the Geo Group, in Adelanto, California, April 13, 2017. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

A third vector for the coronavirus is the daily deportations into Mexico, and near-daily ICE deportation flights into Central America, Haiti and elsewhere. Those aboard these flights aren't tested for COVID-19; ICE agents just take their temperatures before they board.

Guatemala, which has only documented just over 300 cases of coronavirus infection, is claiming that more than 60 of its citizens deported by the United States in recent weeks tested positive. Guatemala has halted the deportation flights, but by doing so has opened itself up for White House retribution: A recent White House memo gives the administration authority to suspend US visas for citizens of countries that don't take US deportees.

Government contractors erect a section of Pentagon-funded border wall in Yuma, Arizona, September 10, 2019. Matt York/AP

The fourth hot zone is in southern New Mexico and Arizona, on the construction sites where sections of the border wall are being hastily built. New influxes of work crews are constructing fencing 24 hours a day, through the night, earning generous overtime from the defense budget so that Trump can claim to have built hundreds of miles of border wall by Election Day in November.

The workers on site don't live in these remote desert areas. They fly in from elsewhere in the country and spend several days working, eating and living side-by-side in hotels and "man camps," without social distancing, before returning to their home communities around the country. The resulting risk of coronavirus spread is tremendous.

The situation at the US-Mexico border right now is patently illegal in many ways. For now, though, advocates for migrant rights can do little about it beyond make noise. The coronavirus has slowed an already glacial court system, and border agencies have kept many of their implementation memos secret, hampering efforts to challenge the administration's new expulsion policy.

Congress is just barely functioning until it can find a way to convene virtually, leaving committee chairs with little more to do on the oversight front than send angry letters. All of this has done little to constrain a runaway executive whose anti-immigrant agenda, now at full strength, is placing more lives at risk during a pandemic.

Adam Isacson is senior associate for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America.