Ambulances wait at the emergency department at UCSF Parnassus in 2025. Hospitals have become a battleground in the immigration fight now that federal agents are allowed to operate in medical facilities

Theresa Cheng is not only a UCSF professor and emergency department doctor, but she’s also a civil rights attorney. Her expertise in the medical and legal fields offers a unique perspective on the fallout from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

As Cheng wrote in an Open Forum on Thursday, hospitals have become a battleground in the immigration fight now that federal agents are allowed to operate in medical facilities

“The public conversation has really been focused on immigration crackdowns in the community and in detention centers and immigration courts, but not so much in health spaces,” Cheng told me.

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When ICE brings people to hospitals for treatment, or arrests them at hospitals, medical personnel find themselves in confrontations with agents who try to dictate care or block access to patients. Emergency departments treat anyone who comes through the door, citizen or not, and treatment decisions should be made solely for medical reasons. 

“They’re meant to be spaces where everyone can be treated equally and get the same emergent quality care as the next person,” Cheng told me. “When we erode these spaces, … we’re just dismantling the very safeguards of what the health care system is supposed to do.”

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So far, there are no laws or professional guidelines for how medical personnel should deal with federal agents. Cheng is working with the National Immigration Law Center to update a set of protocols for the care of patients who are in immigration custody.

And while you may think this fight is only happening in Minneapolis or near detention centers in Texas, Cheng said California is not immune, especially the Los Angeles area, which was targeted in an earlier immigration enforcement surge.

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“I think this is only going to worsen dramatically. We’re definitely going to feel it in the Bay Area,” Cheng said. “ICE is expanding dramatically and rapidly at breakneck speed in this next year.”  

Cheng wrote in an Open Forum last year that the immigration crackdown would endanger lives by discouraging undocumented immigrants from seeking medical care over fear of getting caught in the deportation dragnet. She said the warning is coming true. People are putting off treatment.

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“We are already seeing people later. And sicker and harder to treat,” Cheng said. “I’ve already had patient deaths because of the immigration crackdown.”

Read Cheng’s Open Forum. Let us know what you think with a letter to the editor or an Open Forum submission on our website.

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