Lawmakers urge an Ebola travel ban, Obama opposed

As calls grow louder for a travel ban to prevent flights or deny visitors from West Africa, President Obama remains opposed to blocking travel from the three Ebola outbreak countries.

Lawmakers have repeatedly used the phrase travel ban without defining it. A travel ban could take several forms, but all have challenges.

A flight ban would have no impact because there are no direct flights between the U.S. and Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Suspending visas would affect only citizens of those countries, but not thousands of health-care workers and military troops fighting the disease -- even as two of the three patients diagnosed in the U.S. were nurses.

Obama and his health advisers argue that hindering travel would allow the outbreak to widen in West Africa as travelers seek ways to evade the official restrictions.

"If we institute a travel ban instead of the protocols that we've put in place now, history shows that there is a likelihood of increased avoidance," Obama said Thursday. "They're less likely to get treated properly, screened properly, quarantined properly. And as a consequence, we could end up having more cases rather than less."

Congressional calls for travel restrictions began with better screening. The outbreak countries conduct exit screening before allowing travelers into their airports, checking whether their temperature is above 100.4 degrees, and asking about possible contacts with Ebola patients.

A Liberian national, Thomas Duncan, who became the first diagnosis of the disease in the U.S. after arriving in Dallas on Sept. 20, had a temperature of 97.3 degrees, but didn't tell airport officials that he carried a pregnant woman suffering from Ebola. He died Oct. 8 and two nurses who treated him have become infected.

Customs and Border Protection and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began similar screening during the last week for anyone arriving from the three countries at five U.S. airports: New York area's John F. Kennedy and Newark, Washington's Dulles, Chicago's O'Hare and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson. The airports handle about 94% of the 150 travelers arriving daily from the three countries.

A travel ban could involve the Federal Aviation Administration prohibiting flights of U.S. airlines to a specific country, as often happens in war zones and happened briefly in July with Israel's airport in Tel Aviv over concerns of rocket fire in the country's conflict with Hamas.

But there are no direct flights between the three West African countries and the U.S. Travelers, such as Duncan, take connecting routes, in his case through Brussels, before arriving in the U.S., so the administration argues that restrictions would be more effective if focused on travelers rather than airlines.

Michael Huerta, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, said Thursday that Obama and CDC are leading the debate on possible travel restrictions, but that his agency is participating.

"We are now working together and assessing this on a day by day basis," Huerta said. "CDC's determination is that a travel ban in and of itself does not address the challenges that we have here, but it is something that we continue to monitor."

Beyond airports, a more direct way to target travelers would be to suspend visas – the special permission slips that countries grant travelers for visits – for anyone from the three West African countries.

The chairman and subcommittee chairmen of the Homeland Security Committee, led by Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, called Wednesday for the State Department to suspend 13,500 visas from the affected countries.

Despite enhanced screening, the lawmakers said they "believe additional steps should be considered to curtail the potential spread of Ebola to the United States."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned against non-essential travel to the affected countries for months. The State Department removed family members from the embassy in Liberia on Aug. 8.

But the State Department hasn't announced visa restrictions. Visas, of course, would affect only citizens of those countries, rather than U.S. health-care workers and military troops returning from the hot zone.

Thomas Frieden, the CDC director, told a House hearing Thursday that open borders with screening allow health officials to track the disease and ask questions about possible exposure to Ebola. He warned that borders are porous in Africa and travelers may head over land to other countries before flying to the U.S.

"We won't be able to check them for fever when they leave," Frieden said.

If travelers evade screening by traveling from different countries, Frieden warned that health officials wouldn't be able to quarantine them if they had a high-risk exposure to the disease.

"We wouldn't be able to obtain detailed locating information, which we do now, including not only name and date of birth, but e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, address, addresses of friends, so that we could identify and locate them," Frieden said. "We wouldn't be able to impose controlled release, conditional release on them, or active monitoring, if they're exposed."

Restrictions could be broader than visas. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and the border subcommittee chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., proposed Thursday that Obama deny entry to the U.S. for any citizens from the three countries.

They cited the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act as granting Obama the authority to prohibit foreign citizens from entry if it "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States." The denial of entry could occur either at the State Department's consular office in the affected country or when Customs and Border Patrol officers interview the traveler at a U.S. port.

Goodlatte and Gowdy cited an Obama travel ban in August 2011 to restrict international travel for people "who participated in serious human rights and humanitarian law violations."

Travel bans are rare. One of the most publicized is the ban begun more than 50 years ago under President Kennedy to restrict almost all travel between the U.S. and Cuba. Some exceptions exist now for citizens of each country to get a small number of travel visas, but typically only to visit relatives or for educational, religious or business purposes.

Obama said he isn't philosophically opposed to a travel ban, and he's reviewing options daily with top advisers. But he argued Thursday that the better strategy is to pour resources into West Africa and continue travel screening.

"People do not readily disclose their information," Obama said under a travel ban. "They may engage in something called broken travel, essentially breaking up their trip so that they can hide the fact that they have been to one of these countries where there is a disease in place."