Trump May Quarantine Parts of New York, New Jersey, Conn. (4)

President Donald Trump said he’s considering an enforced quarantine for parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to curb the coronavirus outbreak -- a move that could fall afoul of the U.S. Constitution and was described by New York’s governor as a potential “federal declaration of war.”

Trump told reporters he’d spoken with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Saturday morning before departing the White House to send off a Navy hospital ship bound for New York City from Norfolk, Virginia.

“There’s a possibility that some time today we’ll do a quarantine,” he said.

The president said “some people” would like him to impose a quarantine on the region, which accounts for more than half the U.S. infections. “It will be for a short period of time if we do it at all,” he said.

Trump followed his comments with a tweet, saying “a decision will be made, one way or another, shortly.” He made a similar remark in Norfolk when he visited the USNS hospital ship Comfort.

In Albany, Cuomo said the issue of a quarantine didn’t come up during his talk with the president and that a mandatory quarantine was “scary.”

In an interview with CNN, Cuomo said attempting to lock down New York would run afoul of states’ rights and interstate commerce law, and would create “chaos and mayhem.” Targeted quarantines would shock the economy, the opposite of what Trump has said he wants, Cuomo said.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said “nothing about quarantine” came up when he spoke with Trump on Friday.

“Whether prompted by the president or more often on our own, we’ll continue to be as aggressive as we’ve been, and not let up,” Murphy, a Democrat, said at a press briefing on Saturday in Trenton.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, also a Democrat, said in a statement that he’d already called on state residents to stay home. “I look forward to speaking to the president directly about his comments and any further enforcement actions, because confusion leads to panic,” Lamont said.

The U.S. had reported more than 105,000 cases of the disease as of Saturday and more than 1,700 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The country has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

‘Two Weeks’

The quarantine would be for “two weeks on New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut,” Trump said. It would “restrict travel, because they’re having problems down in Florida, a lot of New Yorkers going down, we don’t want that.”

As he boarded Air Force One in Maryland, the president said states he didn’t identify were asking him to take action to quarantine the New York and New Jersey area.

“They go to Florida and a lot of people don’t want that,” he said.

The president probably would exceed the powers granted him in the Constitution if he were to quarantine New York and nearby areas, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health at Georgetown University.

“Is it const’l? Probably not w/o Cong authority. He hasn’t even consulted @NYGovCuomo,” Gostin said in a tweet, using shorthand for New York’s governor.

Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, said the White House was examining its legal authority in regards to enforcing a quarantine of certain parts of the country. “We are evaluating all of the options right now,” he told reporters.

DeSantis, a Republican and a close ally of Trump, has repeatedly expressed his concern about travelers coming from the New York area to Florida, which has always had a large number of part-time residents from the northeast. That includes Trump, a lifelong New Yorker, currently resident in Washington, who in 2019 declared himself a resident of Florida.

“How is it fair to them to just be air-dropping in people from the hot zones, bringing infections with them and seeding the communities with new infections that they are trying to stamp out?” DeSantis said at a press briefing on Saturday.

”Whatever works, I think we need to do,” DeSantis said, adding that a Florida program for identifying and screening travelers from New York and advising them to self-isolate has already been productive.

Flights Eyed

DeSantis has said allowing flights from New York area airports to continue normally would have been like allowing such flights from China or Italy earlier in the crisis.

He’s already ordered all arrivals from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to self-isolate upon arrival. But he’s also used press briefings to lament that he can’t take more aggressive action, noting only the federal government has such power.

Rhode Island state police, assisted by the National Guard, on Saturday began searching for people who’d traveled from New York and planned to ask them to self-quarantine.

Asked at the White House about his ambition to urge many Americans to return to work by the U.S. Easter Sunday holiday on April 12, Trump said: “we’ll see what happens.”

(Updates with Cuomo in seventh paragraph.)

--With assistance from Jonathan Levin, Todd Shields and Jordan Robertson.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Mario Parker in Washington at mparker22@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net

Ros Krasny

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