White House Has No Immediate Plans to Shut Down US Domestic Travel

In an interview today with Fox News, Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf answered a question that may be on many Americans’ minds since the federal government began instituting travel bans and closing U.S. borders, and as multiple state and city officials have issued “stay at home” orders to their residents in an effort to control the transmission of the coronavirus-outbreak” target=”_self” rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer”>COVID-19 virus.

Wolf said that the Trump administration has no plans at this time for a full shutdown of domestic travel within the U.S. or for restricting the entire nation’s movements, coronavirus-shutdowns/2020/03/22/id/959415/” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer”>Newsmax revealed.

“There has been a number of governors, New York and California, that have taken the extra step and imposed additional strict measures,” he explained. Wolf said that the White House fully supports the tighter restrictions and community lockdowns being imposed in areas where COVID-19 case numbers are spiking, or there is a high potential for community spread of the virus simply because of population density.

He said that, in those parts of the country where the number of coronavirus cases is spiking, officials are working with federal authorities—the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Health and Human Services (HHS) Department and the Coronavirus Task Force—to determine appropriate measures.

“We will continue to look at that and if we see we need to put targeted travel restrictions in place we will do that,” Wolf explained. “I will say there’s no immediate plans as of right now for any widespread travel restrictions.”

For now, he said, “We’re focusing on those states and those localities that, again, have widespread community transmission—so, New York, California, Washington.” The approach, he said, is to implement “more aggressive measures” in these areas so that, hopefully, they won’t need to be enforced elsewhere in the country later on as the course of the epidemic continues.

“We continue to evaluate this, really, on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis,” Wolf commented.