WASHINGTON - Trump administration officials confirmed Thursday that they will not allow any American who was exposed to Ebola back into the country. A 50-bed field hospital quarantine facility for Americans that is being constructed in Kenya will be operational on Friday, according to senior administration officials.

If someone tests positive or develops symptoms, they will be sent elsewhere for advanced care. Officials weren’t clear where such patients would be sent but said it will not be the U.S.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department are working to identify tertiary care facilities that could take Americans if needed, officials said.

The facility will be located at the Kenyan air force’s Laikipia Air Base, outside the city of Nanyuki. It will eventually include a number of biocontainment and isolation units to hold people who test positive or develop symptoms until they can be transported to more specialized facilities, though the officials did not say when those units would be operational.

Officials said the unit will initially be staffed by 30 U.S. public health officers, who trained for three days earlier this week and are now en route to Kenya. The deployed officers include physicians, nurses, therapists and technologists, one of the officials said.

Officials pushed back on criticism that the public health officers’ training was not thorough enough.

Staff responding to the 2014 outbreak received eight to 10 days of intensive classroom and hands-on instruction, according to reports at the time, including time spent treating actual Ebola patients.

But unlike the Kenyan facility, the Monrovia field hospital was built to treat international and Liberian healthcare workers, not Americans.

Sending asymptomatic “high risk” Americans to a separate country to quarantine is a significant departure from previous Ebola outbreaks, when Americans exposed to the virus were often flown back to the U.S. for quarantine or treatment at specialized facilities.

The Trump administration has been reluctant to bring back any American citizen who was infected or exposed to Ebola. In August 2014, President Trump repeatedly criticized the Obama administration’s moves to repatriate U.S. citizens.

The administration already evacuated an infected American doctor to Germany. Another doctor who was exposed to the virus was sent to Prague.

The only time the U.S. has seen domestic transmission of Ebola was in 2014 when a Dallas man was infected during a visit to Liberia. He did not develop symptoms until after returning to the U.S.

Hospital officials came under intense scrutiny at the time for not initially identifying his symptoms as Ebola. He was released after initially seeking treatment before he returned to the hospital and received a laboratory-confirmed diagnosis.

Two nurses who treated him also became infected; they were transferred to specialized U.S. facilities and survived. (Source: The Hill)

Story Date: May 29, 2026