In recent months, federal workers at Southern California hospitals have entered surgical centers, sometimes in shackles.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are also showing up at area clinics. Health care providers say officers tried to host mobile clinics, brandished machine guns in the faces of clinicians working with the homeless and pulled passersby into unmarked cars outside community health centers.
In response to these immigration enforcement efforts in and around clinics and hospitals, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a provision last month that prohibits health care providers from allowing federal agents to enter private property, including where patients receive treatment or discuss health issues, without a valid search warrant or court order.
But while the bill has broad support from medical groups, health workers and immigrant rights groups, legal experts say California cannot stop federal agents from carrying out their duties in public places such as hospital lobbies, public waiting rooms, parking lots and neighborhoods, where recent ICE operations have sparked anger and fear. Previous federal restrictions on immigration in or near sensitive areas, including medical facilities, were lifted by the Trump administration in January.
“The issue that states are facing is,” said Georgetown, a supervising attorney and clinical education researcher. He said the federal government has the right to conduct enforcement operations, but there are limits to what states can do to stop them.
California law designates a patient’s immigration status and place of birth as protected information, which, like medical records, cannot be disclosed to law enforcement without a warrant or court order. It also requires health care facilities to have clear procedures in place for handling requests from immigration authorities, including training staff to immediately notify a designated manager or attorney if they request access to private areas or review patient records.
Several other Democratic-led states have also enacted legislation to protect patients in hospitals and health centers. In May, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill that punishes hospitals that improperly share information about people in the country and prohibits ICE agents from entering private areas of medical facilities without a judicial warrant. In Maryland, a provision went into effect in June that requires the attorney general to develop guidelines to keep ICE out of medical facilities. New Mexico has banned asking patients about their immigration status, and Rhode Island has banned them from asking patients about their immigration status.
Republican-led states are cooperating with federal efforts to prevent health care payments from being spent on immigrants without legal authorization. These immigrants are not eligible for comprehensive Medicaid coverage, but states bill the federal government for coverage in certain cases. Under the Act, Florida requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask about a patient’s legal status. In Texas, hospitals are now required to report how much they spend treating immigrants without legal authorization.
“Texans should not have to bear the burden of financially supporting the health care of illegal immigrants,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in an announcement last year.
California’s efforts to curb federal enforcement come as the state, home to more than a quarter of its residents, has become a target of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Newsom signed SB 81 as part of a ban on immigration officers entering schools without a warrant, requiring identification from law enforcement officers and banning police officers from wearing masks. SB 81 passed on a party-line vote with no formal opposition.
“We are not North Korea,” Newsom said at the bill signing ceremony in September. “We push back against this regime’s authoritarian tendencies and actions.”
Some bill supporters and legal experts said California’s law would prevent ICE from violating existing patient privacy rights. These include the Fourth Amendment, which applies without a warrant in places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A valid warrant must: But Genovese said ICE agents frequently use administrative warrants to gain access to private property they are not authorized to enter.
“People don’t necessarily understand the difference between an administrative warrant, which is a meaningless piece of paper, and a judicial warrant, which is enforceable,” Genovese said. She added that judicial warrants are rarely issued in immigration cases.
The Department of Homeland Security has called the requirement for background checks on law enforcement officers unconstitutional. The department did not respond to a request for comment on the state’s new rules for health care facilities, which took effect immediately.
Tanya Broder, senior counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, said immigrant arrests at medical facilities appear to be relatively rare. But the federal government’s decision to rescind protections around sensitive areas “sparked fear and anxiety across the country,” she said. Many of the most high-profile news reports about immigration officers in medical facilities have been in California, primarily involving detained patients brought in for treatment.
The California Nurses Association, the state’s largest nurses union, co-sponsored the bill and expressed concerns about the treatment of Milagro Solis Portillo, a 36-year-old Salvadoran woman who was under 24-hour ICE surveillance at Glendale Memorial Hospital over the summer.
and union leaders for agents at California Hospital Medical Center, south of downtown Los Angeles. Anne Captopard, a union representative and labor nurse at the hospital, said the staff brought the patient in on October 21 and remained in the patient’s room for almost a week. The newspaper reported that TikTok streamer Carlitos Ricardo Parias was injured during an immigration raid in South Los Angeles and was taken to the hospital that day.
Caputo-Pearl said ICE’s presence was intimidating to nurses and patients, prompting visitation restrictions at hospitals. “We would like a clearer explanation,” she said. “Why are these agents allowed in the room?”
But hospital and clinic representatives said they were already following the law’s requirements, largely reinforcing what state Attorney General Rob Bonta issued in December.
Community clinics across Los Angeles County, which serve more than 2 million patients a year, mostly immigrants, have been implementing the attorney general’s guidelines for months, said Louise McCarthy, president and CEO of the Association of Community Clinics. of Los Angeles County. He said the law should help clinics ensure uniform standards across the health care facilities they refer to and reassure patients that procedures are in place to protect them.
Still, McCarthy said, it hasn’t prevented immigration raids from happening in the broader community, scaring some patients and even health care workers. He said several incidents have occurred near the clinic, including a passerby arrested outside the clinic in East Los Angeles and captured on video by a security guard.
“The clinic staff asked me, ‘Is it safe?’ myself go out? ‘ she said.
Jim Mangia, CEO of St. John’s Community Health, a network of 24 community health centers and five mobile clinics in South Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, agreed that the new law would not stop all immigration enforcement activity, but said it would give clinics the tools to fight back if agents showed up, something he said his staff had to do.
Mangia said staff at St. John’s Hospital had two encounters with immigration officers over the summer. In one incident, armed officers were stopped by staff as they tried to enter the gated parking lot of a drug and alcohol recovery center where doctors and nurses were seeing patients in a mobile clinic.
In July, immigration officer MacArthur Park was arrested on horseback and in an armored vehicle in a show of force by the Trump administration. Mangia said undercover police in full tactical gear surrounded a street medical tent where St. John’s Hospital health care providers were treating homeless patients, yelling at staff to leave and pointing guns at them. Mangia said medical workers were so shaken by the incident that mental health professionals had to be brought in to help the man feel safe returning to the streets.
A DHS spokesperson told CalMatters that in the rare cases when employees enter certain sensitive locations, officers will be required to do so.
Since then, St. John’s Hospital has stepped up its efforts to provide support and training to its staff and offered home-based care and grocery delivery options for patients who fear leaving their homes. Mangia said patient anxiety and ICE activity have decreased since the summer, but he doubts that will continue as DHS develops a plan.
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