Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill last week sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after a Chinese national who entered the country illegally earlier this year was found in October to have tuberculosis while at a federal detention center in Basile.
The lawsuit, which names several defendants including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ICE detention facilities in Louisiana, asks a federal court to bar the facilities from releasing detainees until they've been medically cleared by the Louisiana Department of Health.
Murrill announced the lawsuit Wednesday while Gov. Jeff Landry held a news conference in Baton Rouge to address the state's public health response.
"At this time we have no indication that the public is in any danger," said Landry.
According to the lawsuit, the person in question crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and was detained by federal authorities in California in July.
The detainee, whose identity is redacted in court filings, was flown with over 100 others to Alexandria and then taken to the Richwood Correction Center in Monroe.
The person received a positive skin test for TB on July 23 and then "received a chest x-ray that was noted to be suspicious for active TB."
Three days later, the person was transported to the Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, and in August was "released into general population" at that facility, where "approximately 174" detainees were "potentially exposed."
On Oct. 9, after hospitalization and isolation for active TB, the state health department confirmed the person had a "rare, aggressive, and drug-resistant form of tuberculosis," a state court filing said.
Louisiana Surgeon General Dr. Ralph Abraham, who was at the Wednesday news conference alongside Landry, said today the patient is in isolation and receiving "proper medication" and is now asymptomatic.
As long as ICE detention facilities adhere to the court's temporary restraining order, which blocks the release of detainees without state medical clearance, “there’s no reason at all to be concerned about spread,” Abraham said.
There are currently no confirmed cases related to the person in isolation, said Dr. Pete Croughan, deputy secretary at the Louisiana Department of Health, though the state is continuing to investigate.
What to know about tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, or TB, is an airborne bacterial respiratory disease. Once the cause of a quarter of all deaths in the U.S., advances in treatment, screening and diagnostic tools have made the disease relatively rare in the U.S. There are currently 79 cases in Louisiana.
Symptoms of tuberculosis include chest pain, a bad cough that lasts longer than three weeks and coughing up blood or sputum from deep inside the lungs.
There are two types of TB: latent and active cases. In latent TB, a person may test positive on a skin test, for example, but cannot transmit the virus.
“Millions of Americans that have latent TB infection are walking around and are no threat to anybody unless they become active,” said Susan Hassig, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor emerita at Tulane University.
Active cases of TB mean the bacteria are multiplying. These people are capable of infecting others, though transmission risk is low unless the person has symptoms such as coughing, said Hassig.
A small portion of active TB cases are drug-resistant, meaning the infection does not respond to typical antibiotics. These cases are still treatable, but require longer courses of drugs.
About 90 cases in the U.S. were multidrug-resistant in 2022, making up about 1.4% of cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Still, the chance of an asymptomatic patient infecting others is “low,” said Hassig.
“This is not COVID,” said Hassig. “This is not even the flu, in terms of transmissibility. It’s something that needs to be addressed medically if the person has active TB … but it’s nothing to get bent out of shape about.”
A bigger battle over immigration
Louisiana's lawsuit against DHS and ICE comes just weeks before a national presidential election in which immigration has played a central to role in the politics of the race.
Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has repeatedly spoken against immigrants living in the country illegally and slammed his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris for the border policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
Landry, a Republican and outspoken Trump supporter who previously served as state attorney general, said on Wednesday that while he was AG, he "warned consistently" against "an open, porous border."
"This is the type of crisis that occurs when we let people come into this country unchecked," he said.
After the news conference in a social media post, Landry said: "Now we have a Chinese national that is in the country illegally with a rare form of TB that the State of Louisiana has to deal with! That’s why we need Trump!"
