PROFESSOR MAKHLOUF PUBLISHES ARTICLE ON POLICYMAKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF HEALTH LAW AND IMMIGRATION LAW
October 2023 — Professor Medha D. Makhlouf recently published an article titled “Interagency Dynamics in Matters of Health and Immigration” in the Boston University Law Review. The article is one of a series of articles that Professor Makhlouf has written as part of her broader research agenda on health law and immigrants.
The article is the first to apply theories from the administrative law literature on interagency relationships and coordination to case studies involving the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It opens with a description of the benefits and challenges of policymaking in “shared regulatory space”—where health and immigration law and policy collide. The article then introduces the three case studies: the care of unaccompanied immigrant children; the expulsion of immigrants arriving at the southern border during the recent public health emergency for COVID-19; and the exclusion of beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals from eligibility for subsidized health coverage. Professor Makhlouf’s analyses of the case studies reveal that health-related expertise and priorities are routinely subordinated to an administration’s immigration policy preferences in these shared regulatory spaces, which contravenes Congress’s purpose in establishing related or overlapping jurisdictional assignments to HHS and DHS. Professor Makhlouf claims that there is a need to extend administrative law theories of shared regulatory space in order to account for the predictable subordination of certain policy areas to others.
The Boston University Law Review also published a Response to Professor Makhlouf’s article authored by Renée M. Landers, Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School and a former Deputy General Counsel for HHS. The response, “Elevating Public Health and Other Long-Term Interests in Government Policymaking,” focuses on Professor Makhlouf’s suggestion that structural interventions alone will be insufficient to change how political actors prioritize health issues and value health expertise in HHS-DHS shared regulatory space; rather, a new “health security” framework could be helpful for broadening political actors’ vision when making decisions in this space.
Professor Medha D. Makhlouf is the Elsie de R. and Samuel P. Orlando Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic at Penn State Dickinson Law. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Penn State College of Medicine. Professor Makhlouf’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of health law, immigrants’ rights, and poverty law and policy. Her recent scholarship has been published in the New York University Law Review, the California Law Review Online, and the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics. Professor Makhlouf’s work is available at https://works.bepress.com/medha-makhlouf/.