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Two American cities fight to block quarantine facilities in their communities

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Two American towns just told the federal government: not here.

Within the same 72-hour window in late February 2020, elected officials in Costa Mesa, California, and Anniston, Alabama, discovered that federal agencies planned to house COVID-19-positive Americans evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in their backyards — and neither city was consulted first. One went to federal court. The other went straight to the White House. Both won, at least for now.

• Costa Mesa officials learned on February 20 that federal agencies planned to move 30 to 50 infected evacuees from Travis Air Force Base to the state-owned Fairview Developmental Center, and U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton granted the city a temporary restraining order late on February 21 halting the transfer.
• In Alabama, after Governor Kay Ivey, Senator Richard Shelby, and Representative Mike Rogers appealed directly to President Trump on Sunday, February 23, over a plan to quarantine evacuees at FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston, Trump personally assured them no evacuees would be sent there.
• Federal attorneys pushed back in court, arguing that local “fear of COVID-19 does not justify such unprecedented intrusion into federal quarantine decisions.”

Costa Mesa’s Emergency Injunction

Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley and the City Council say they were blindsided. Federal officials had settled on the 109-acre Fairview Developmental Center — a state-owned property that sits against dense residential neighborhoods — as a landing spot for infected evacuees, without briefing the city that would actually be living next to it. Foley pointed out the irony bluntly: the same site had previously been judged unsuitable even to serve as a homeless shelter, let alone a quarantine facility for an active virus outbreak.

With no advance notice and no chance to review safety protocols, the council moved for an emergency injunction rather than wait for the first transfer buses to arrive. Late on February 21, Judge Staton sided with the city and issued a temporary restraining order, freezing any patient transfers to Fairview until the court could examine whether the site was actually fit for the purpose and whether proper containment measures were even in place.

Federal Government Pushes Back

The Justice Department wasn’t willing to let the ruling stand quietly. In filings, federal attorneys argued that Costa Mesa’s objection amounted to local government second-guessing a national quarantine decision during an active public health emergency — the kind of call, they said, that belongs to federal health authorities, not a city council.

Local “fear of COVID-19 does not justify such unprecedented intrusion into federal quarantine decisions.”

That framing set up a genuine legal fight over how much authority cities have to block federal quarantine siting decisions inside their own limits — a question that hadn’t been tested at this scale before the Diamond Princess evacuations forced it into a courtroom.

Anniston’s Direct Line to the White House

Alabama’s version of this fight skipped the courtroom entirely. Local and state officials in Calhoun County said they found out over the weekend — with no warning — that FEMA was eyeing its Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston as a quarantine site for infected Diamond Princess passengers. Governor Ivey didn’t mince words, saying the plan simply “wasn’t fully vetted” before it landed on her desk.

Rather than litigate, Ivey, Shelby, and Rogers went over the agency’s head. On Sunday, February 23, they appealed straight to President Trump, who intervened personally and told Alabama’s congressional delegation that no Diamond Princess evacuees would be sent to Anniston. It was a resolution reached in a single day, through political pressure rather than a judge’s order — a sharp contrast to the ongoing standoff still playing out in Orange County.

Two Cities, Two Playbooks

What’s notable is how differently each community got to the same outcome. Costa Mesa built its case around due process and site suitability, forcing the federal government to answer for skipping local consultation in a federal courtroom. Anniston’s leaders leaned on direct political access — a Republican governor, a longtime senator, and a sitting congressman working the phones straight to the Oval Office. Both approaches produced the same result: evacuees kept out, at least temporarily, while the underlying question of who gets a say in siting a national quarantine facility remains unsettled.

Costa Mesa’s restraining order was never a final answer — it bought the city time to challenge the Fairview site in court, not a permanent block. The next fight is whether that TRO holds up once federal officials show up with a revised safety plan, and whether other Southern California cities named as potential backup sites start filing objections of their own.