A former immigration judge and policy expert said sanctuary policies, not law enforcement, are preventing treatments in response to reports that Minnesota doctors are concerned their patients are not receiving medical care because of ICE operations in the state.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported on a news conference held by Democratic lawmakers and various doctors who claimed that patients are missing out on critical care due to fear of ICE.
Medical providers speaking during the press conference claimed that out of fear, both illegal immigrants and U.S. citizens are skipping out on care, including diabetes treatments, checkups and even giving birth, according to the outlet.
In response, the outlet reported that Department of Homeland Security Assistant Tricia McLaughlin said that “ICE does not conduct enforcement at hospitals — period.”
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Andrew Arthur, who is a law and policy fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, further backed this up, telling Fox News Digital that, “There have not been any reports that ICE has gone into any medical facility, any hospital, any clinic, any doctor’s office.”
“Now if the concern is that when somebody is traveling to one of these facilities, there also aren’t any ICE roadblocks being set up to check everybody for their status, so it’s not like they’re going to be looking for them in that context,” he went on.
Arthur said the only reason the surge of federal law enforcement officers to Minnesota occurred in the first place was because of the state’s unwillingness to cooperate on immigration enforcement.
“This situation has been created by the sanctuary policies,” he said. “What ICE is doing is targeted operations against specific individuals that they are looking for in Minnesota. And, of course, that is because … [the state] issued an opinion that said that local county jails in Minnesota could not hold people based on immigration detainers. Consequently, they’ve been turned out in the street, and ICE has to go into the communities to find them.”
“The only reason that ICE is in communities looking for people and potentially finding people that they’re not looking for, collateral arrests, is the fact that Minnesota has these sanctuary policies,” he explained. “If Minnesota, if Hennepin County, if Minneapolis and St. Paul simply allowed ICE to take custody of criminal aliens from their jails, ICE wouldn’t be running this operation there at all.”
Arthur said that “really what this comes down to is not the enforcement, it’s the status of the people who are there.”
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“Framing it as a public health issue is almost too cute by half, because the issue isn’t whether somebody can get medical treatment or not, the issue is whether somebody has lawful status in the United States or they don’t,” he said. “The only reason that any individual would be afraid of ICE enforcement is because they don’t have status in the United States, either because they entered illegally or because they overstayed non-immigrant visas or because they committed some crime that would make them removable from the United States.”
