A doctor in Chicago was forced to make an impossible choice, Jennifer Obel wrote for Slate: make up a diagnosis to protect a 29-year-old Venezuelan man from being seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The patient, wrote Obel, “was brought into a Chicago emergency room” by ICE, with a “deep gash above his eyebrow, bruised ribs, and a head injury,” while four agents stood waiting to take him away after being looked over.
The doctor, identified only as “Dr. N” to protect her from reprisal, knew releasing him “could mean transfer to the Broadview Detention Center, a facility widely feared in immigrant communities and known to physicians and attorneys for documented allegations of abuse and inhumane conditions.”
“Seeing the agents, Dr. N felt the tension,” Obel wrote. “Her parents had immigrated to the United States from Iran, and during Operation Midway Blitz agents had once stopped her, she believes, for appearing Hispanic. But when she entered the exam room, her own unease receded as the patient’s anxiety filled the space. With the help of an interpreter, she examined his injuries and made a deliberate decision. She admitted him to the hospital.”
Dr. N entered a diagnosis of possible pneumonia, calculating “that immigration agents could not simply wait in the hallway” and would have to leave. Ultimately, it worked.
This incident was not isolated, wrote Obel: “In Minneapolis, physicians warned at a recent press conference that immigration enforcement had crossed a dangerous line — into the exam room itself. Patients are skipping appointments, electing for home births, and avoiding hospitals altogether out of fear of encountering ICE. Several physicians said the disruption feels worse than the height of COVID, with widespread fear, chaos, no clear end in sight.” Meanwhile, Republicans in Ohio are considering legislation that would require hospitals give ICE full access, or lose Medicaid funding.
Obel herself previously worked at a clinic that treated a number of immigrants, she noted. “We never asked about citizenship status — not because it was irrelevant, but because we understood the cost of the question itself,” she wrote — that is, “many patients feared that if they were honest, medical providers would report them to immigration authorities.” And if health care workers did ask these questions, or were forced to allow agents in, many people would simply stay away and let illness and injuries go untreated.
History, she concluded, “will remember whether states chose to keep hospitals as places where illness could be diagnosed and treated without suspicion or consequence. A health care system that cannot hear its patients cannot heal them.”
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