Patients’ fears of immigration raids lead them to miss doctors’ appointments, reported Christine Mai-Duc for KFF Health News on August 14. Some doctors had stopped offering telehealth visits after the COVID-19 pandemic, but have brought them back as ramped-up immigration enforcement drives patients without legal status — and even their U.S. citizen children — deeper into the shadows, she wrote.
Patients in need of care are increasingly afraid to seek it after Trump rescinded a Biden-era policy that prevented immigration officials from conducting operations in “sensitive” areas such as schools, hospitals, and churches, Mai-Duc explained. Clinics and health plans have adopted strategies from their COVID-19 response, updating tested methods to care for patients who are scared to leave their homes.
Clinic administrators have experienced a substantial drop in in-person visits among immigrant patients, Mai-Duc reported. “At St. John’s Community Health clinics in the Los Angeles area, which serve an estimated 30,000 patients without legal status annually, virtual visits have skyrocketed from roughly 8 percent of appointments to about 25 percent, said Jim Mangia, president and CEO. The organization is also registering some patients for in-home health visits, a service funded by private donors, and has trained employees how to read a warrant.” “People are not picking up their medicine,” Mangia said. “They’re not seeing the doctor.”
“Mangia said that, in the past eight weeks, federal agents have attempted to gain access to patients at a St. John’s mobile clinic in Downey and pointed a gun at an employee during a raid at MacArthur Park,” Mai-Duc wrote. “Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractors sat in a Southern California hospital waiting for a patient and federal prosecutors charged two health center workers they say interfered with immigration officers’ attempts to arrest someone at an Ontario facility.”
There’s no sign that the Trump administration plans to change its approach, Mai-Duc noted. Federal officials have attempted to temporarily pause a judge’s order that limits how they conduct raids in Southern California after immigrant advocates filed a lawsuit accusing ICE of using unconstitutional tactics. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on August 1 denied the request, keeping the restraining order in effect.
In July, Los Angeles County supervisors directed county agencies to explore expanding virtual appointment options after the county’s director of health services noted a “huge increase” in phone and video visits, Mai-Duc reported. Meanwhile, state lawmakers in California are considering legislation that would restrict immigration agents’ access to places such as schools and health care facilities — Colorado’s governor, Democrat Jared Polis, signed a similar bill into law in May.
Immigrants and their families will probably resort to more expensive emergency room care as a last option, Mai-Duc cautioned.
She wrote, “’The Latino community is facing a fear pandemic. They’re quarantining just the way we all had to during the COVID-19 pandemic,’ said Seciah Aquino, executive director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, an advocacy group that promotes health access for immigrants and Latinos.”
