By Kimberly Galindo, Special for CalMatters
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
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Armed men with dark, bulletproof vests entered my hospital unit just before dawn on June 19 and began loudly insisting I take them to a patient’s room.
The agents demanded confidential information, saying the patient they were looking for had been detained before. They didn’t show any formal identification or a warrant.
I instantly knew they were with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE raids have spread terror throughout our communities. Federal agents had been targeting worksites, schools and court houses, but that morning they’d set sights on Riverside Community Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center.
As an experienced nurse, I knew I didn’t have to comply with their request and refused to give them any information about the patient or where the patient was. After I repeatedly but calmly denied the ICE agents’ access, they eventually left my floor.
A less experienced nurse might not have this confidence, which comes with many years on the job. I knew the agents’ demands were a clear violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal law protecting all patients’ privacy.
Riverside Community Hospital is part of HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital chains in the country, caring for more than 43 million patients annually. HCA and all hospitals have a responsibility to protect patients and to support nurses, who serve their communities every day.
That means issuing clear, formal policies that outline what to do when ICE enters the hospital. And it means training nurses, doctors and all frontline staff to uphold our ethical and legal responsibilities, even in the face of outrageous federal overreach.
What happened that day was a clear violation of federal and state law. I believe any nurse would call it a “never event” — a serious, preventable and potentially costly error — that should not happen to any patient, under any circumstance.
ICE has reportedly shown up at hospitals in Oxnard and Glendale and a surgical center just outside of Los Angeles. These actions sow fear and confusion. They disrupt patient care, violate privacy and run counter to state and federal patient protections.
As a direct result, many immigrant patients are avoiding care altogether, afraid that they or a family member could be arrested.
Nurses also are being placed in impossible positions, forced to choose between our livelihoods and our duty to care, protect and advocate for our patients. Nurses take a pledge to speak out on behalf of patients, not to report them. We are ethically and legally bound to protect private health information.
The men that day acted as if our ethical and legal duty was just an annoying inconvenience for them.
Thankfully, California lawmakers recently took action to protect hospital patients from ICE’s reach. Legislators passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 81, which prohibits ICE agents from accessing non-public areas of California hospitals when they don’t have a warrant.
It also expands patient privacy protections to include immigration status and place of birth. And it requires hospitals to train staff on how to respond when ICE agents request access to protected areas or patient information. Now, all California hospitals must comply.
In this unprecedented climate, it is incumbent on hospital operators across the nation to create an environment of protection and calm. Health care workers must never be pressured to identify patients based on nationality or immigration status. If hospitals compel health care workers to do so, they would be violating the law.
Even worse, they would be deepening the trauma ICE already has inflicted on many communities and compromising the trust that must be at the heart of health care.
Unfortunately, we’re now seeing the Trump administration completely disregard an existing California law that bars ICE from making arrests at courthouses. Hospitals should anticipate that ICE will keep coming and ramp up education and training quickly — to protect patients and prepare nurses.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.