Updated at 5:15 p.m. with details from Trump.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump defended his abrupt announcement of a freeze on immigration on Tuesday as allegations mounted that he is using the COVID-19 outbreak as a pretext —to distract attention from his mishandling of the crisis and to advance an agenda he held long before the pandemic.

The "pause” will last 60 days, and could be extended based on economic conditions, he said at the White House on Tuesday night, adding that the freeze applies only to immigrants seeking permanent residency, or green cards. It exempts temporary workers, a broad category that includes seasonal farm labor and high-tech workers who receive H1B visas that let them work for several years in the United States.

“We want to protect our U.S. workers,” Trump said, arguing that it would be “wrong and unjust” to allow immigrants to compete with American citizens in a period of such widespread unemployment. Plus, he said, “a short break from new immigration… will protect the solvency of our health care system.”

Trump announced the broad outline of the freeze via Twitter on Monday night, explaining the need to halt immigration “in light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens.”

The assertion that immigration threatens public health at this stage in the crisis is questionable. The United States now accounts for about a third of COVID-19 infections worldwide, meaning that if anything, other countries have more to fear from American travelers.

And for the last week, Trump has been pressuring governors to reopen businesses and lift stay-at-home restrictions to start reviving the economy. His argument that the economy is too delicate to absorb immigrants seems to contradict his assertions that the worst has passed in all but a handful of hot spots such as New York City.

“This action is not only an attempt to divert attention away from Trump’s failure to stop the spread of the coronavirus and save lives,” tweeted Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, “but an authoritarian-like move to take advantage of a crisis and advance his anti-immigrant agenda.”

In Austin, Gov. Greg Abbott defended Trump’s freeze.

"He wants to do everything possible to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the United States,” Abbott said at a news conference, citing agreements with Mexico and Canada to shut U.S. borders to all but essential traffic during the crisis, and restrictions on travel from China and Europe. "He wants to enhance the strategies to reduce further importation of COVID-19 until we can get control of this disease.”

This action is not only an attempt to divert attention away from Trump’s failure to stop the spread of the coronavirus and save lives, but an authoritarian-like move to take advantage of a crisis and advance his anti-immigrant agenda. We must come together to reject his division. https://t.co/wYEai4rYVY — Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) April 21, 2020

Trump denied that he is using the health crisis as a pretext to curb lawful immigration.

“No. No,” he said at his nightly press briefing. “I want the American worker and American citizens to be able to get jobs. I don’t want them to compete right now.”

As of last Thursday’s weekly jobless report, 22 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in a single month — a staggering blow to families and the U.S. economy.

The administration has not pointed to immigration, legal or otherwise, as a cause. Rather, the collapse stems from the need to close businesses and keep most of the U.S. population in their homes to slow the spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus.





Democratic Party national chairman Tom Perez blasted Trump for resorting to immigrant-bashing as a “crisis PR strategy.”

“He ignored the warnings of experts, he failed to prepare, and he spread lie after lie. Now … he needs a scapegoat,” Perez said, accusing Trump of trying to use “bigotry as a shield for his own incompetence. Right this minute, countless immigrants across the country are risking their lives to keep our country safe – in hospitals and grocery stores, at nursing homes and in our nation’s uniform.”

Officials in the Trump administration concede that the new order won’t represent a significant change to current policy. Trump indicated that his new order isn’t intended to speed deportations.

He had already halted almost all immigration during the crisis. Border controls are as tight as they’ve been in decades. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are turned away, and anyone caught trying to enter the United States is being expelled immediately.

The State Department is not taking new visa applications, or processing existing applications.

Legal challenges are likely.

In January, Trump barred entry to the United States for non-Americans who had been in China in recent weeks. In March, he banned travel from most of Europe for non-Americans.

Countries around the world have largely closed their borders to nonessential travel in a bid to slow the spread, but these are generally cast as temporary travel restrictions rather than as changes to immigration policy.

On March 18, the U.S. and Canada agreed to close their border to nonessential travel.

Two days later, Trump announced a similar closure along the U.S.-Mexico border, offering assurance that trade would continue to flow and citing concerns – unsupported by any evidence – that disease-bearing migrants could overwhelm the U.S. health care system.





Mexico’s infection rate was far lower than that of the United States at the time, and still is. And no evidence has linked the southern border to the outbreak.

The United States accounts for nearly a third of the 2.5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases around the globe. Mexico has reported 712 deaths, compared with more than 42,000 for the United States, according to the most recent tracking data from Johns Hopkins University.

Immigrant advocates accused Trump of using the crisis as yet another pretext to promote racist stereotypes about disease-bearing foreigners, and to advance a restrictionist agenda that Congress had repeatedly stymied.

This is not about the policy. It is about the message the president wants to send. He wants people to turn against “the other.” And, regardless of the valuable contributions immigrants are making to the response and recovery, he sees immigrants as the easiest to blame. — Ali Noorani (@anoorani) April 21, 2020

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called Trump the “xenophobe in chief.”

Latino Victory executive director Mayra Macías accused Trump of “once again using his old playbook of scapegoating immigrants to cover up his failures. ... He’s not taking responsibility for the thousands of lives lost, for the millions of jobs lost, and for the lack of support for our health care workers who are on the front lines saving lives.”

At the Trump campaign, spokesman Tim Murtaugh said the president "has two main goals: to protect the health and safety of Americans and to safeguard the economy. This decision addresses both. The usual suspects are sniping from the sidelines, but they have always cared more about scoring political points against the president than they do about anything else.”

Public Health Updated with second positive test: Is the U.S. deporting immigrants with coronavirus? A 29-year-old Guatemalan deportee has tested positive for coronavirus, leading to concerns that the U.S. may be deporting immigrants who have COVID-19. The Guatemalan is believed to be the first case of the deportation of an infected immigrant. A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the Guatemalan, whose identity hasn’t been disclosed, had no symptoms when he boarded his deportation flight near Phoenix. By

Austin correspondent James Barragán contributed to this report.