Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — By July the public-health sentence is exhausted. The operational sentence isn’t.

The authority was written for communicable disease and in March 2020 it had a face — a novel virus, crowded holding rooms, no vaccine. This is a different country. Shots, boosters, full airports, and an administration that will not apply the same standard to a terminal in Queens that it applies to a riverbank in Texas.

The other half is what happens if you drop the tool and leave the asylum statute untouched. You don’t return to normal legal process. You return to a queue that functions as release-and-hope.

So we have two costumes. A health title doing border work, and a protection statute doing catch-and-release work. I won’t pretend the first is medicine. I won’t pretend removing it without a replacement is law.

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — The operational fact is that when the authority is in force the numbers behave one way, and when it’s rumored dead they behave another. People on the trail hear a rumor in Tapachula.

That isn’t a public-health elasticity. It’s an immigration elasticity, and it’s the whole argument.

I’ll support it as a temporary tool only if the administration says the quiet part: we don’t have a processing system that can conduct this many interviews without becoming a parole program.

Say that, then ask Congress for a volume rule and an expedited process that’s actually expedited. If they won’t say it, they shouldn’t get to shelter inside agency letterhead.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — If the stadiums are full you cannot tell a foreign government this is still a quarantine regime. That sentence is finished.

What remains is a border-management device hanging on a health hook, and devices like that get challenged because statutes mean what they say when the facts move.

The trap is the next sentence. Retire the device and leave the protection system as a slow yes and you’ve chosen a different extra-legal outcome.

I’d add the regional consequence, since my part of the world is inside this. Haitians expelled under this authority have been flown to a country most of them left a decade ago, that is currently without a functioning government, and that has no capacity to receive them. Whatever the authority is for, it isn’t for that, and the expulsions continued after the public-health justification had visibly thinned.

Novi, MI Correspondent — I look at this the way I’d look at a quality gate built for one defect and now used to stop a flood. The gate is the wrong shape and the flood is still a flood.

The text is disease, not asylum volume. By this summer the mismatch is visible to judges, to migrants, and to voters, and when all three can see it the tool’s legitimacy as health law is spent.

What isn’t spent is the operational need for a rapid no. That’s an immigration-statute problem, and the executive has been shopping for hooks — health, parole, enforcement priorities — because the number broke the underlying design.

Honesty would sound like: this is no longer the right title, we’ll use the narrow remainder for actual facility outbreaks, and we need a replacement authority that doesn’t pretend to be disease control.

Dayton, OH Correspondent — Ohio isn’t a border county and still pays pieces of the aftermath when the rumor changes.

If we apply one standard to Dayton International and another to a processing centre, we aren’t doing medicine. We’re doing selection, and selection might be defensible as emergency management but not as disease control.

The result is that judges are now the border agency, and I don’t want judges writing expulsion rules any more than I want an executive stretching a title until a court slaps it.

That loop is the policy. Break it with text that can say no at this scale without a virus.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Ports live under posted rules. Rules that say disease while the cruise terminal is boarding aren’t posted rules.

Legitimate is a word with two rooms. In the health room, no. In the room where the question is whether the government retains any rapid off-ramp at the line, this is the off-ramp they actually use.

Using it without writing the real one is how you lose both rooms.

We’re about to have more legal respectability and less operational capacity if it falls and nothing replaces it. That’s a choice. Don’t call it health and don’t call it compassion.

Wheeling, WV Correspondent — If you can fly to a wedding you can’t call the river a quarantine. That half is settled.

The other half is whether we have any tool left that isn’t catch-and-release with better stationery, and we don’t, not at this volume under the clock as it’s actually run.

I’ll say the thing my side skips. The people walking are responding rationally to an incentive we built, and describing them as an invasion makes it harder to have the argument about the statute.

Fix the statute. Be decent about the people. Both.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — From outside the legal mismatch is obvious. You reopened your tourist economy and kept a pandemic expulsion code at the land border.

Allies understand control measures. We use them and I won’t pretend otherwise — our own offshore arrangements have been criticized by every international body that reviews such things, and some of that criticism was earned.

What we do is write them in the migration statute where they can be argued about. Borrowing a disease title after the disease period has moved on is how you lose in your own courts and look improvisational abroad.

You’re arguing about a hook because you won’t argue about a number.