Minnesota physicians are sounding the alarm over the health care impacts of the surge in federal immigration enforcement activity.
Roughly 50 physicians joined Minnesota Sen. Alice Mann, DFL-Edina, and Sen. Matt Klein, DFL-Mendota Heights, at a press conference Tuesday to share their experiences amid “Operation Metro Surge,” which has flooded the state with as many as 3,000 federal officers.
“I have been a practicing physician for more than 19 years here in Minnesota, and I have never seen this level of chaos and fear in the health care for patients and for our health care teams,” said Dr. Roli Dwivedi, past president of the Minnesota Academy of Family Physicians.
Patients not seeking care
Dr. Erin Stevens, legislative chair for the Minnesota section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said patients have “expressed to us a feeling of being hunted” and that some are giving birth alone.
“Our patients are missing, canceling or deferring important appointments for prenatal care out of fear of being targeted by immigration officials in their place of care,” she said. “Anecdotally, many of our labor and delivery triage units are seeing lower volumes as a sign that individuals are not seeking out care.”
Dr. Janna Gewirtz O’Brien, president-elect of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said parents are “rightfully” scared to come in.
“I’ve seen babies miss their jaundice follow-ups,” she said. “We’ve seen moms that have called and said, ‘My baby is having trouble breathing. I don’t know if I should come in.’ Unacceptable. And we’ve seen a burst appendix that could have been detected days earlier.”
More stories
Dwivedi shared more stories:
• A patient with kidney cancer was a no-show for a scheduled visit. His clinician found out he had been detained and moved to Texas without his medications. Legal intervention eventually got his medications to him, but Dwivedi said it’s unknown whether he is actually taking them.
• A patient with insulin-dependent diabetes stopped coming to the clinic. Dwivedi said it was discovered that the patient was out of both insulin and food, and rationing both without knowing how to adjust insulin.
• A pregnant mother missed her check-up and stopped answering her phone. A nurse went to her home and found her 8 centimeters dilated and laboring alone. Dwivedi said she delivered her baby two hours after the nurse convinced her it was safe to go to the hospital.
• A patient discharged from the hospital missed their follow-up, and Dwivedi said what should have been “a routine wound-care appointment turned into a life-threatening case of sepsis.”
• In Dwivedi’s clinic parking lot, a mother and a son were “forcefully separated” while trying to fill a prescription for a seizure medication, and the trauma of the incident triggered a medical crisis. Dwivedi said the son was rushed to the hospital in the midst of a seizure while his mother was sent to a detention center in Texas.
• One teenager nearly collapsed from starvation, surviving on a single egg in three days after her entire family was detained, Dwivedi said.
“I have dozens of other stories to share, but the bottom line is, is this making America healthy again?” she said.
Hospital staff impacted
Gewirtz O’Brien said Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity is not only affecting patients, but also hospital staff.
“First of all, half of our staff are not coming in at the hospital where I work. Our health care workforce is extremely diverse,” she said. “The people taking care of our patients are Somali. They are Latina, and when we look at the nurses, at the health care assistants and at the physicians, many of us are also from backgrounds that are actively being harmed by the campaign of racial profiling and hate.”
When asked whether there is any legal recourse for ICE activity in health care spaces, or any legislative fixes, Klein, the DFL senator from Mendota Heights, said the Legislature “should at least codify what best practices are for that interaction.”
Mann, the Edina senator, said she thinks there is no guarantee that federal agents “would follow any of them (laws).”
“The problem is that we can pass 110 laws, but ICE is already acting above the law. They are already acting unlawfully and against the Constitution,” she said. “We have Fourth Amendment rights that protect these private spaces, and they don’t care. So we can come up with 110 different laws. Certainly, we have no guarantee that they will follow any of them.”
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