Immigrants Archives - 51ÊÓƵ Health News /tag/immigrants/ 51ÊÓƵ Health News produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is a core operating program of 51ÊÓƵ. Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:14:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.10 /wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=32 Immigrants Archives - 51ÊÓƵ Health News /tag/immigrants/ 32 32 257378068 US Poised To Boot Legal Immigrants From Medicaid, Including Refugees and Sex-Trafficking Victims /medicaid/immigrants-kicked-off-medicaid-refugees-asylum-seekers-trump-big-beautiful-bill-cbo-2/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2291547 Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with legal status are at risk of losing government health coverage starting Oct. 1, state data shows, signaling that the impact of Medicaid changes in President Donald Trump’s signature legislation from 2025 may be greater than anticipated.

Many lawfully present immigrants will be among the first people to lose Medicaid coverage under congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is expected to cut spending by more than $900 billion through 2034 for the state-federal health program for people with low incomes or disabilities. The law will strip many more immigrants of their Affordable Care Act plan subsidies and Medicare coverage next year.

Those losing their health benefits who were previously eligible include refugees of war, asylees who fled persecution, victims of sex trafficking, and interpreters who risked their lives assisting U.S. service members in Afghanistan — all of whom are in the country with the federal government’s permission. The law does not affect coverage for a few groups, including those who hold green cards.

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, estimated the law’s changes eliminating Medicaid eligibility for many noncitizen adults with legal status would lead to about 100,000 more immigrants being .

51ÊÓƵ Health News asked several states how many Medicaid enrollees they had identified as being at risk of losing coverage under the provision. More than 281,000 immigrants from nine states and the District of Columbia are expected to lose Medicaid in October.

While some may be able to obtain coverage elsewhere, the state numbers suggest hundreds of thousands of immigrants nationally are at imminent risk of becoming uninsured.

The CBO declined to comment.

Florida alone identified nearly 177,000 immigrants who would no longer qualify for the state’s Medicaid program starting in October, said Anna Holaday, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Children and Families. The agency verified the enrollees’ immigration status through government databases and sent notices to people to give them an opportunity to provide more information proving they remain eligible, Holaday said.

Arizona predicts nearly 28,000 could lose eligibility. New Jersey expects 15,000 to 25,000 of its noncitizen residents to lose their Medicaid coverage. In North Carolina, it’s about 29,000, and in Washington state it’s 11,000. Final numbers from states on how many Medicaid enrollees have been terminated from the program won’t be available until later this fall.

Lawmakers rely on the CBO to understand the budgetary and economic impacts of proposed legislation. Yet the federal agency did not publish estimates on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s impact on noncitizens enrolled in Medicaid until a month after Congress passed the bill and Trump signed it into law.

Much of the attention around Medicaid changes in the law has centered on implementation of work requirements as a new condition of eligibility for many enrollees starting in January. The CBO estimates the requirements will increase the number of uninsured Americans by about 5 million by 2034.

Without health coverage, immigrants are likely to lose access to doctors, prescription drugs, and most other medical services. They still could qualify for coverage of emergency care under a separate program known as Emergency Medicaid.

“I came here to live a better life,” said Ahin, a refugee who left war-torn Syria for Turkey in 2011 and came to the U.S. in October 2024. She spoke with 51ÊÓƵ Health News on the condition that she be identified by only her first name, out of concern for her privacy and security.

Soon after arriving in the U.S., she developed severe abdominal pain that required intestinal surgery. Those costs, along with ongoing visits to specialists, were covered by Medicaid.

“I’m really worried about this,” she said. “It’s truly a terrible situation.”

Ahin, 25, said she doesn’t know what she will do if she needs to go to the hospital — she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill. She lives in a small apartment in New Jersey with her mother. Medicaid has also been vital to her mother, who has asthma.

Health Benefits Wane for Immigrants

The federal government required states to notify immigrants who will soon lose coverage, but immigrant rights advocates say some states did not begin sending letters until September. That’s given enrollees little time to react, including to respond if the state was mistakenly ending their coverage.

Cutting off Medicaid coverage is just the first move to drop government health benefits provided to many lawfully present immigrants. Under a change starting in January, the CBO estimates, about 1 million will lose eligibility for government subsidies to buy individual health coverage on Affordable Care Act marketplaces by 2034. And they will also lose access to Medicare, a change expected to affect about 100,000 immigrants, the agency forecasts.

Trump has argued that taxpayer-funded programs should be reserved for American citizens. As Congress debated the legislation in May 2025, the White House with the misleading claim that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would remove Medicaid coverage for people who are in the country without authorization.

Under long-standing law, people who are in the country without authorization do not qualify for the general Medicaid program that is funded by state and federal dollars.

The health coverage cuts are part of a broader Trump strategy to send a message that immigrants are not welcome in the United States, said Ben D’Avanzo, senior strategist for federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center. The Trump administration has also moved to kick people with legal status off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and tried to do the same with the children’s program Head Start until a federal judge intervened. 

In addition to green card holders, people under age 19 and immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, or certain Pacific Island countries their Medicaid coverage affected by the law.

A Few States Try To Fill in the Gaps

Some states are staving off the coverage loss using their own money. California expects about 148,000 immigrants to lose Medicaid coverage. But the state is spending $365 million for a separate program to keep them covered until July 2027, according to Tony Cava, a spokesperson for the California Department of Health Care Services.

New York and Pennsylvania also have state-funded health coverage for many of the immigrants who are affected.

Carlos Alarcón, health and public benefits policy manager with the California Immigrant Policy Center, an advocacy group, said taking away health coverage for immigrants will affect the health of the state as a whole. The fewer people who have access to healthcare, the easier it will be for contagious diseases to spread, as happened during the covid pandemic, he said.

Alarcón said he hopes the state-funded coverage will be extended under California’s next governor. Polling released in September showed Democrat Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, leading Republican Steve Hilton in the gubernatorial race. Becerra to issue an executive order to maintain health coverage for every Californian affected by federal cuts.

“I believe there’s folks in the legislature that will really want to fight to make sure that we restore things as much as we can,” Alarcón said.

Refugee assistance groups say they have been trying to educate people in their communities and direct them to health clinics that are government-funded or free.

“We’ve just been scrambling trying to find free medical care,” said , co-founder of the . “To not be a welcoming place is the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced.”  

Andrea Mendez Perez, director at Interfaith-RISE, a refugee resettlement organization in southern New Jersey, said the Trump administration has elongated the process for people to get green cards and is now taking away coverage from those without them. Before 2025, it typically took about six months to qualify for a green card, documentation that allows a foreign national to live and work permanently in the United States, she said. Today, it’s well over a year.

For many of these immigrants on Medicaid, losing their ability to get their prescribed medications “is a life-or-death situation,” Mendez Perez said.

Ahin, the Syrian refugee, applied for permanent residency soon after arriving in the U.S. two years ago. Mendez Perez said she should have her green card by now, which would have spared her from being dropped under the GOP law. “She is stuck in the middle and has no control.”

Colleen McCauley, policy and advocacy director at the Camden Coalition, a nonprofit that helps connect people to healthcare in southern New Jersey, said the loss of coverage is devastating.

“None of them did anything wrong,” McCauley said, “and they are losing coverage.”

51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2291547 A Generation of Kids Suffer as Trump Destabilizes Immigrant Families /race-and-health/trump-ice-immigration-immigrant-families-kids-parents-separation-health-trauma/ Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2277474 The little girl stared up at Norma Gómez from the doorway of her neighbor’s apartment, her sad, brown eyes suddenly flashing with hope.

“Are you the person who’s going to bring my mom back?” she asked.

Gómez struggled to find an answer. It was a December morning, and she’d brought food, diapers, baby wipes, and clothes — items she hoped would help the 6-year-old girl, her baby brother, and the neighbor who had stepped in to care for them. The children were left alone after federal immigration agents arrested their parents outside their apartment in Oxnard, a mostly Latino agricultural community on the Southern California coast. But Gómez had no power to bring the parents back.

“We’re working on that,” Gómez recalled telling the girl. In reality, she was at a loss for how to answer truthfully without upsetting her.

As a project manager for a nonprofit that provides food assistance to immigrant families affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Gómez has witnessed the tumult and pain that have roiled the lives of since President Donald Trump returned to office, with devastating consequences for children’s health. They include an estimated with at least one parent detained by immigration authorities through April, a number that has undoubtedly climbed since. Separation from parents harms children psychologically. It destabilizes families, often leaving the remaining parent or caregiver scrambling to stay housed, buy food, and fulfill kids’ medical needs. Some kids are to care for themselves.

A portrait of a woman wearing a colorful embroidered short sleeve shirt.
Norma Gómez, a project manager with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project in Oxnard, California, provides food and basic supplies to family members caring for children with parents detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’ve included a stepfather caring for four girls; a 16-year-old caring for her younger siblings; and numerous aunts and uncles. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)

Many kids whose parents aren’t detained are experiencing threats to their health and well-being too. Two children in the South in February 2025 after reportedly being bullied over their family’s alleged immigration status.

Millions of children live in families losing access to , , , and other supports as roll back eligibility for immigrants with and without legal status. Fear of federal enforcement has pushed parents to avoid , going to the doctor, and . Some have disenrolled from or avoided signing kids up for health and nutrition programs.

Children from immigrant backgrounds are also . They’re experiencing more , increased , and anxiety about , even when they or their family members are citizens or legal residents.

Most of these children are American citizens. About have an immigrant parent, including around 4.6 million with a parent who lacks legal status.

“I’m really concerned about how long it’s going to take for us as a country to address all of the harm that’s happening to this generation of kids,” said Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the . “This type of stress can have long-term developmental harm and can really inhibit their ability to do well in school, to have good health outcomes, and to grow into thriving, stable adults.”

Curbing Public Benefits

Trump has made cracking down on immigrants — including the children of immigrants — a priority since his second term began last year. On Inauguration Day, he issued an purporting to end birthright citizenship for kids born to parents without legal status or in the country on temporary visas, an attempt ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court.

His administration, with the approval of Republicans in Congress, has into immigration enforcement, detaining the parents of an estimated 145,000 U.S. citizen children as of April, and, according to an analysis by nonprofit newsroom The Marshall Project, . It’s sought to rescind , or TPS, for over 1 million immigrants, tens of thousands of whom have U.S. citizen children, and in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which includes the parents of about .

White House officials say the immigration crackdown by freeing up resources such as jobs and housing, reducing pressure on public coffers, expelling criminals, and restoring integrity to the immigration system. (Studies have shown that mass deportations .) Trump and other Republican leaders have argued that birthright citizenship and “,” and that TPS has allowed immigrants from “” to remain in the United States indefinitely under what is supposed to be a temporary program.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis did not directly address whether the administration is concerned about long-term harm to children and increased healthcare costs because of its immigration policies. Instead, she repeated past White House criticisms that President Joe Biden’s immigration policies allowed children to be trafficked across the U.S. border.

“The real story is the psychiatric impact on the tens of thousands of children who were smuggled across the border — many by human and sex traffickers,” she wrote in an email.

A woman writes on a clipboard as she speaks to another person whose back is to the camera.
Gómez at a monthly food distribution organized by the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project in Santa Paula. She says she has delivered food to families caring for children with one or both parents detained by immigration authorities. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)

Only 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has accused the children of immigrants of draining public resources and perpetuating problems from their parents’ home countries. Research, however, shows that immigrants and the longer they live in the United States and that they and their children . Data also shows they than native-born Americans.

“This is the great lie of mass migration,” on the social platform X in November. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

The Republican tax-and-spending law enacted last summer curbs immigrant eligibility for health and food assistance programs. And this July, the administration issued new “public charge” rules that give immigration officers broad discretion to deny green cards to lawfully present immigrants if they or family members have used public benefit programs, a move that could result in U.S. citizen children disenrolling from safety net healthcare programs.

Together but Afraid

Separation from parents is and can lead to , including anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease, and learning difficulties. Children separated from their parents at the border during the first Trump administration were found to exhibit . Researchers have also tied deportations and detentions of immigrant parents — as well as the threat of them — to widespread , higher , , among both immigrant and U.S.-born children.

It’s also costly to society. A by federal researchers estimated that health conditions related to childhood trauma accounted for $292 billion in healthcare spending in 2021 alone, including by taxpayer-funded programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

Emmanuel, a 13-year-old in Oxnard, gets anxious every time his dad goes to work as a farm laborer, his mother, Ana, said. He asks her for reassurance that his father will return, and about what would happen to him if his parents got detained. He tries to hurry Ana up when they’re out in public, worried that ICE could suddenly appear. 51ÊÓƵ Health News is not using their full names because they fear deportation.

Doctors and therapists interviewed by 51ÊÓƵ Health News said they have observed a notable increase in mental health problems, especially anxiety, in children from immigrant families. Kimberly McNally, a pediatrician at Venice Family Clinic’s Inglewood South La Brea Health Center, said she’s regularly referring children of all ages for mental health services related to fears that their parents will be taken away. At daycares, kids have been showing up with an extra bag in case their parents don’t pick them up, said Liza Davis, advocacy director for Children in Immigrant Families at The Children’s Partnership, which works with a coalition of early childhood educators.

Sometimes, the distress leads young people to take extreme actions. In June, 19-year-old Eliel José after his father was deported from the Atlanta area to Mexico, according to Univision.

Rosie Harrison, executive director of Grow Initiative GA, a community organization that serves low-income families, said she’s received calls over the past year from immigrant parents seeking help for suicidal and depressed kids. Their situations are often made worse because many lack health insurance and can’t afford to pay for therapy. That’s often because parents have lost jobs that came with health insurance due to worksite raids or because of eligibility changes imposed by the Trump administration.

“I’m concerned about the families that are going to be burying their child,” Harrison said. “I’m concerned that we are going to miss out on having an amazing person do amazing things for our community, for our country, because they took their life.”

Strength Under Pressure

Many children are showing resilience, though.

In a role reversal, some children have become their parents’ protectors. They go grocery shopping and take their younger siblings to school so that their parents don’t have to leave the house.

A small crowd of people stand in front of a refrigerated delivery truck that says, "Food Share" on the side.
Gómez (center), a project manager with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project, stands next to volunteer Ezequiel Alonso (left), as they prepare to distribute food and school supplies to families in Santa Paula. Many families are struggling due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)

Giselle Gonzalez, a university student and volunteer with the immigrant protection network VC Defensa in Ventura County, California, said she’ll never forget the morning last summer when she woke up to the sound of kids on bicycles pedaling through her immigrant-heavy neighborhood in Thousand Oaks, yelling “La migra! La migra! Don’t come out!” They’d spotted ICE agents grabbing factory workers and gardeners on their way to work, she said.

Neighbors, community groups, health providers, and others have also in a to support children and families affected by immigration enforcement. They , provide , , and help parents create in case they get detained or deported.

Ultimately, more humane immigration policies and enforcement tactics will be required to end the harm being done to children, academic experts and advocates said.

Researchers at point to a pilot called the as a model for keeping families together while also enforcing immigration laws. Launched in January 2016 under President Barack Obama, the program allowed families seeking asylum to remain in the community while awaiting resolution of their cases. Through a case manager, they received support in meeting the obligations of their immigration cases and preparing for deportation if needed. The program, which and cost-effective, was terminated by the first Trump administration.

At Venice Family Clinic in Los Angeles, case manager Mabel Alavez sees the pressures facing families who are still together but worried they could be separated. Many of the people are parents or grandparents who have been in the U.S. for decades. Some are afraid to take their children to school, the park, or the beach. They ask whether it’s safe to enroll their U.S.-born kids in Medicaid. She helps families who are facing eviction because they’re afraid to go to work and can no longer afford rent. She often helps them create plans for who will look after their children if they get detained.

Raised in an immigrant family herself, Alavez knows how challenging it can be for kids who are first-generation Americans to navigate growing up, going to school, and finding a sense of belonging in a country their parents aren’t from.

“It’s hard for me to imagine how they could possibly do that in addition to what’s going on now,” she said. “I do feel like there will be a big impact on them. What that might look like, I’m not exactly sure.”

51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2277474 Readers Share Personal Insights on Deadly Denials and Pregnancy Centers /letter-to-the-editor/reader-response-deadly-denials-pregnancy-centers-glp1-july-2026/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2259597&preview=true&preview_id=2259597 Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names.

A Tragic, Deadly Denial

I read your article in The Washington Post about the woman whose Humana policy required prior authorization for a drug she’d been taking (Bill of the Month: “She Struggled To Get a Lifesaving Drug Even After Insurers Vowed To Help,” June 29).

My husband, Kenney, had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. On June 7, he fatally shot himself after a COPD exacerbation event.

His pulmonologist had prescribed two new nebulizer prescriptions on June 2. One was a specialty medication that would come directly from the drug company. A couple of days later, we called Walgreens to see why the other one hadn’t been filled. Turns out it required prior authorization.

Why the doctor who prescribed it needed to tell his health insurer that he really did think his patient needed it, I will never understand. The pharmacist said she would send the request to the doctor. And why she hadn’t already done that, again, I do not understand. By June 7, of course, it still wasn’t filled.

That day, a Sunday, Kenney experienced the flare-up when I was out mowing the yard. How terrifying it must have been for him to be unable to breathe and me not being there at least to hold his hand. That night he killed himself, leaving a note saying that he hated to leave me but that he couldn’t keep living like that — with the constant anxiety of not knowing when he wouldn’t be able to draw a breath.

Not long ago, a “welcome” packet came in the mail about the other nebulizer treatment — 25 days after it had been prescribed.

Admittedly, my husband’s health was not great. He did have COPD, but we still went out to eat once in a while, and he didn’t have to take his oxygen on those trips. He rarely used it just walking around the house.

He did make a serious suicide attempt six years ago (our daughter and granddaughter had died), but after seeing what it did to me and our son, he promised he’d never do it again. It was only when these exacerbation/flare-up events started this year that he indicated life was getting bad.

Perhaps, just perhaps, if he had received both medications in a timely manner, he would be here today, and we would have had many more years together. We met when we were 16 and had been together ever since. He was 78 when he died.

— Cindy Clements Blewett; Kyle, Texas

Navigating GLP-1 Coverage

Sydney Lupkin’s thoughtful article about the obstacles in obtaining weight loss drugs was interesting (Healthcare Helpline: “Trouble Getting Weight Loss Drugs Covered by Insurance? Here’s What To Know,” June 26). It would have been more helpful had it included a discussion of Medicare’s decision to cover these drugs as of July 1, 2026, and how to navigate the rocky shores of obtaining a prescription that won’t be denied.

— Sharie Hartman; Manteca, California

Beyond the Veil of Pregnancy Centers

I would like to address the article about a pregnancy resource center providing prenatal care in Sandpoint, Idaho (“Religious Anti-Abortion Center Finds Opportunity in Town Without OB-GYNs,” May 20). It is unfortunate that many still do not understand what pregnancy resource centers do, nor the high-quality care they provide. While there are some “crisis pregnancy centers” that provide limited offerings, most centers are aligned with a national organization like the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, the Heartbeat Pregnancy Center, or Care Net. All these organizations require centers to have a medical director (a licensed healthcare practitioner) and require that the nurses who perform the ultrasounds have appropriate training. While I am not affiliated with 7B Care Clinic, I am concerned that the article may not have accurately reflected what is provided in such clinics. I offer my experiences to bring further clarity.

I work at a life-affirming women’s clinic. I am a board-certified family physician. I have delivered approximately 1,000 babies in my career. I have been performing ultrasounds for my patients for over a decade, and fought for this ability under the scrutiny of maternal-fetal medicine specialists, spending time alongside their registered diagnostic medical sonographer technicians, and having my scans reviewed by maternal-fetal medicine physicians. I have practiced medicine in three states over three decades.

Second, while I am life-affirming, I am not “anti-abortion.” I happen to believe that there are better choices, and I know that some women will still choose abortion, even after hearing all their options. I will gladly see those women for follow-up to answer questions and evaluate for complications — something that the abortion clinics in my area apparently will not do. I say this because that is what the women I see tell me. The clinic that performed the procedure or gave them the pills will not see a patient after the abortion for any follow-up. I have always willingly seen patients for any reason, whether I was working at a private clinic or hospital-owned clinic. That is no different now that I work for a life-affirming women’s clinic.

We provide a variety of services — free of charge. We are also stepping up to provide prenatal care up to 20 weeks because there is a shortage of obstetrical clinicians in our county. We encourage women to see a clinic where they can be followed throughout the entire pregnancy, if possible, and we are in no way marketing ourselves as competition. We are stepping in to fill the large gap that exists.

Just because the clinic in Sandpoint chooses to respect life does not make it a fake clinic. This clinic seeks to bring in physicians to provide prenatal care. They are bringing in OB-GYNs from Washington state, which has no restrictions on abortion. With this information taken into consideration, I ask you to reconsider any concerns about a clinic bringing board-certified OB-GYNs into an area where there is a shortage.

— James Heid, Vancouver, Washington

The Root of All Good

The article Claudia Boyd-Barrett wrote about how immigrant parents’ arrests are creating a mental health crisis for children was moving and brought awareness to the mental health challenges faced by them (Growing Up Scared: “Arrests of Immigrant Parents Create Mental Health Crisis for Children,” June 18). It was important to note how every story was different but focused on how much children missed and yearned for their parents to come back home. You also wrote about how it affected them by not having a parental figure in the home. That really touched me. Specifically, Jacob’s story and when he listed all the things he missed about his mom but especially being close to her.

I am currently a master’s student in social work working to become a better ally to the Hispanic immigrant community. I’ve seen how being afraid and sad over the immigration policies has affected my friends in this community. Losing a close parent and not being able to have that security with them anymore is hard to go through, and trauma affects children as they grow.

In this article, you have recognized the worth of a person, which is a core principle in social work. These children are worthy and have the right to feel taken care of and secure.

I would love to see more mental health services accessible to immigrant communities and their families. This would benefit children as they learn to cope with their feelings and how to make sense of a new world.

— Stacy Xiong, Athens, Georgia

Bagging a Bargain

Author Susan Jaffe mentioned GoodRx in the article “Thousands of Medicare Beneficiaries Thought Their Drug Plan Was Free. Then They Lost It” (July 7), but she failed to mention a much better discount drug site, Mark Cuban’s costplusdrugs.com, where a 90-day supply of 2.5 milligrams of rivaroxaban, a generic for Xarelto, is available for under $50. This could help the thousands of people who lost coverage through unpaid premiums from Wellcare Value Script obtain their medications. The problem of yearly increasing penalties for losing Part D coverage is something that has to be addressed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Thanks to 51ÊÓƵ Health News for the relevant coverage.

— Jackie Button; Miami

Fleshing Out the Details

Your report identifying alpha-gal syndrome as a red meat allergy is accurate in that respect but inadequate in its breadth (“Would Hunters Take a Lyme Disease Vaccine? We Asked,” June 30). Alpha-gal is an allergic reaction to virtually all mammalian products. If you explore that, you’ll find an interesting story, as mammalian products are everywhere, including in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and other non-meat products. Alpha-gal is growing rapidly, and too many people, including doctors, do not realize that AGS is far worse than just a red meat allergy.

I suggest you help build understanding of the threat by describing the allergy in the future as an allergy to mammalian products. If you do not think your audience will understand that term, perhaps you can explain that it includes pork and anything derived from animals with hooves. As a former and now retired reporter, I encourage you to cover this allergy because its implications are surprising and scary.

— John Varner, Surry, Virginia

51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2259597 They Harvest the Nation’s Food, but a New Rule May Strip Them of Health Insurance /insurance/agricultural-workers-medicaid-eligibility-immigration-food-harvest/ Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2257673 Seasonal work. Inconsistent hours. Frequent moves. Cash payments and informal jobs. For farmworkers who rely on Medicaid, these common employment patterns could put their health coverage at risk.

It’s a heightened concern for the estimated who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, as new work requirements kick in for the federal-state healthcare program that serves low-income and disabled Americans.

Starting next year in most states, many adults enrolled in Medicaid will have to prove they work, are enrolled in college or vocational courses, volunteer, or do unpaid work for at least .

Advocates say this could pose a significant challenge to Medicaid-eligible farmworkers, who frequently work more than 80 hours a month during harvest season but less in other months. What’s more, outside the harvest season, many workers take on informal jobs in construction, landscaping, or home repair for which they don’t receive formal paychecks that would prove their continuing Medicaid eligibility. Still, they can establish eligibility if they prove their average monthly income over six months is equivalent to at least 80 hours of work at the federal minimum wage.

“Having a work requirement — having to create more paperwork and more proof — is certainly extremely challenging for farmworkers and others who are low-income and who may especially have seasonal jobs, not year-round, and do have periods” when there is no work available, said Alexis Guild, vice president of strategy and programs at .

New Requirements, Additional Hurdles

Agriculture is a , and Americans to put food on their tables. Nearly 60% of those workers are U.S. citizens or green-card holders, according to the . The remaining 40% lack legal status or are otherwise ineligible for Medicaid.

Even among farmworkers with citizenship or legal status, the uninsured rate is three times that of the general population, and most farmworkers with insurance are Medicaid beneficiaries, although participation rates vary by state. According to a , 71%-79% of eligible farmworker households report participation in Medicaid.

The new Medicaid work requirements were a key provision of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed last July by President Donald Trump. Under the federal law, and the District of Columbia must implement the requirements by Jan. 1. A few states have the work rule early.

The 80-hour rule applies in states that expanded Medicaid, a process that began in 2014 and was tied to the Affordable Care Act. Following the initial expansions, agricultural workers with legal documentation became to have health insurance, according to a 2021 article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Immigration Anxieties

The work requirements are the latest in a long list of obstacles placed between workers and the healthcare they’re legally entitled to, Guild said. “Medicaid certainly helps because it alleviates the cost issue,” she said. “But there are still other barriers, such as transportation, taking sick leave, and finding time to visit a health center. All these factors can prevent them from actually receiving medical care.”

For farmworkers with green cards and naturalized U.S. citizens, there is another source of stress: the fear that signing up for Medicaid could put personal information in the hands of immigration authorities.

That’s what worries Luis, a 45-year-old green-card holder and Medicaid recipient who dreams of becoming a U.S. citizen. Luis — who asked to be identified by only his middle name — lives with his wife and daughter in North Carolina, where he has worked in agriculture for nearly a decade.

Speaking in Spanish, he said that when he learned about the work requirements, he knew it would be challenging for him to prove that he works 80 hours a month. “I only work on farms for six or seven months; the rest of the year I work in whatever I can find,” he said.

Republicans in Congress argue that work requirements will reduce federal healthcare spending, encourage nondisabled adults to , and preserve safety net resources for the most vulnerable populations.

Among Hispanic adults enrolled in Medicaid, 67% are already working, according to a 2025 .

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services did not respond to requests for comment for this article. But in June, when its “nationwide framework” to implement the Medicaid work requirements, Administrator Mehmet Oz said it would help beneficiaries “build skills and independence through work, education, job training, or community service, creating new opportunities for themselves and their families.” Federal officials say the new requirements “could reduce poverty by as much as 2.9 million people.”

Chronic Illness

Agricultural work is one of the nation’s , and it is associated with and , including respiratory conditions. A found that 37% of male farmworkers and 47% of female farmworkers in the state had at least one chronic health condition. The new work requirements present one more barrier for those seeking care, advocates said.

“People skip checkups and screenings, and conditions that could be caught early and treated cost-effectively” aren’t, said Adriana Cadena, executive director of .

Emergency rooms often become the “natural” place to go for healthcare, Cadena added. “This drives up waiting times and costs for all of us. … And when people are sick enough that they miss work, it starts a vicious cycle of lost productivity and family economic instability that again threatens all of us.”

A Loss for Families and Children

The new federal rules also require beneficiaries to verify their eligibility at least twice a year, twice as often as previously, creating another potential obstacle.

“Letters can easily be missed, and forms may go unfilled. If people get caught up in the paperwork, they could lose coverage,” said , an assistant vice president at , a nonprofit that promotes an equitable healthcare system.

For farmworkers who travel from state to state, the process can be especially difficult.

“You have to find the time to transfer your coverage and probably find a person or organization that can help you — and that can be really hard when you’re constantly moving,” Cadena said.

The situation highlights the difficulties of navigating a complex system for individuals and families already struggling to make ends meet.

“The result,” Cadena said, “could be the loss of coverage not only for workers, but also for their families and children.”

51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2257673 In California Governor’s Race, Voters Face Stark Choice on Immigrant Healthcare /elections/california-governor-becerra-hilton-immigrant-healthcare-medicaid-medi-cal/ Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2252202 For decades, Californians have generally said that immigrants, who make up of the state’s population and of its labor force, are beneficial to the state and its economy. But budget instability and concerns about rising costs are spilling into a debate over the controversial and expensive policy of allowing low-income immigrants without legal status to receive state-funded health coverage.

Now, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton present a stark choice to voters in the race to be the next governor at a moment when public support for the state’s generous safety net is starting to fray.

Both frame the choice as an economic one.

Becerra, former secretary of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, has to exclude the poorest immigrants from routine care and push them into expensive emergency rooms . Hilton, a conservative commentator backed by President Donald Trump, has promised to eliminate their coverage and has echoed national Republicans who have to bolster their claims of fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.

With voters nationwide worried about inflation and the rising cost of living, some Californians might feel less inclined to provide full healthcare coverage to those lacking legal status. What the state does next could have profound implications for its healthcare system and sprawling economy.

Over the past decade, California lawmakers used state dollars to expand Medi-Cal, offering all low-income residents comprehensive coverage regardless of immigration status. But enrollment surpassed initial projections, as did the cost. Medi-Cal coverage of immigrants without legal status costs the state roughly , according to California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, more than double the initial estimates.

California lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who , have approved major rollbacks of benefits for those residents. They said the state can’t afford ballooning healthcare costs amid massive federal cuts from the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; the California Health and Human Services Agency projected up to 3.4 million Medi-Cal enrollees and the state could lose more than $30 billion a year in federal funding under the law, causing major disruptions in the safety net health program.

Medi-Cal’s budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year is $217 billion, and the program serves more than 14 million Californians.

Meanwhile, many legal U.S. residents and citizens have seen their health premium payments skyrocket this year after Congress let enhanced federal Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of December.

As the state grappled with a deficit last year, a majority of likely voters in California said — for the first time in nearly a decade — that they opposed providing health insurance to immigrants without legal status, by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“The state faces major challenges, and healthcare is one of the major expenditures,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC survey director. “People have become more selective about how they want to see those limited healthcare dollars spent.”

Hilton, running on a platform of affordability and lowering taxes, has seized on the sentiment, casting health coverage for immigrants without legal status as and a to the state’s ability to help citizens.

“Stop taking money from California taxpayers who can barely afford their healthcare to give free healthcare to citizens of other countries who shouldn’t even be here,” Hilton said in a the morning of the June 2 primary.

In campaign stump speeches, to use the savings to for other Californians without detailing how. Hilton did not respond to requests from 51ÊÓƵ Health News for comment.

“Their messaging is very, very simple: It’s an us vs. them,” said Roger Salazar, a Democratic political consultant who represents a coalition of healthcare advocates who argue providing coverage to people who can’t afford it strengthens the workforce and, as a result, the economy. “It’s just a question of convincing the average voter that it’s much better economically.”

A son of immigrants, Becerra for decades pushed to in Congress and has made a similar pitch in his campaign for governor. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Immigrants, whether documented or not, work hard. They pay taxes, and sometimes they get injured on the job or their children get sick,” during a debate in May. “It would be foolish to tell a family that they don’t have access to the pediatrician or the family doc.”

Becerra, who could become California’s first elected Latino governor, when Newsom and legislative leaders decided to for adults without legal status, cut benefits, and impose monthly premiums.

“Stop treating coverage as a budget variable that expands in good years and contracts when revenue dips,” Becerra wrote in May in response to an Orange County Register . He has new, steady revenue to fund basic services, such as by upping taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Californians.

In 2023, California was home to about 2.3 million people without legal status, representing of the state’s labor force, according to the . And live in a family that includes at least one member without legal status, according to the California Department of Education. Healthcare economists say giving people access to preventive healthcare saves taxpayers money in the long run by and relieving pressure on an overburdened system.

That, Baldassare said, wasn’t a hard argument to make during the covid pandemic, when immigrants were and the link between individual well-being and public health .

But Medi-Cal costs to cover roughly 1.4 million immigrants , according to the latest estimates from the Department of Health Care Services. Because only some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for federal Medicaid benefits, states like California must do so exclusively with state funding.

California’s budget experts that maintaining full Medi-Cal coverage for immigrants without seeking additional revenue would destabilize the state’s long-term fiscal outlook.

In a legislative hearing last year, Republican Assembly member Carl DeMaio questioned whether California taxpayers would prioritize the expansions, saying he doubted “illegal immigrant healthcare in the general fund would be at the top of their list.”

After lawmakers approved the spending reductions, support for immigrant health coverage dropped, Baldassare said. Democratic lawmakers and Newsom  several Medi-Cal cuts until July 2027, leaving decisions for the next governor.

David Hayes-Bautista, who has spent his career studying the economic contributions of Latinos and immigrants, said Californians without legal status and tend to work in industries and occupations that . As a result, many resort to Medi-Cal, saddling the state with the healthcare costs instead of employers.

“California, as a state, has the world’s fourth-largest GDP, which is true thanks to Latinos,” said Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA. Without contributions from Latinos, many without legal status, it drops to eighth place, about the size , he added.

Immigrant advocates hope to have a more vocal champion in Becerra, the favorite to become governor in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1.

“He will fight, he will push back, he will do all that he can,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a former labor leader who has championed the immigrant healthcare expansions. “That’s the most we could expect.”

51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2252202 Journalists Discuss Healthcare Costs’ Political Fallout, Concerns About Canceled ICE Facility /on-air/on-air-july-3-2026-healthcare-costs-midterms-ice-detention-center-georgia/ Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2256464&preview=true&preview_id=2256464

51ÊÓƵ Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby discussed the high cost of healthcare and the political fallout on WAMU’s 1A on June 30.

  • .

51ÊÓƵ Health News senior correspondent Renuka Rayasam discussed the public health concerns around a planned immigration detention center in Georgia on WUGA’s The Georgia Health Report on June 26.

51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2256464 Arrests of Immigrant Parents Create Mental Health Crisis for Children /mental-health/immigrant-parents-ice-detention-deportation-children-mental-health-california/ Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2249688 LOS ANGELES — Damian Zermeño, 15, sensed something was wrong the moment he got home from school.

His aunt sat at the dining table, sobbing. His father, who’d walked him to the bus stop that morning and promised to take him to dinner when he got back, wasn’t there.

Saúl Zermeño, a 45-year-old single dad, had gone to a routine check-in appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that morning, a requirement he’d complied with for years. The father had deferred action that allowed him to stay and work in the U.S., according to his attorney. But that day, Oct. 3, officers deported him to Mexico, where he hadn’t lived since he was 9 years old. Zermeño had been Damian’s sole caregiver since he was a baby because his mother chose not to be involved in the boy’s life, the family said.

Suddenly, Damian, who was born in the U.S., found himself separated from his father by thousands of miles and a heavily guarded border. The previously cheerful 10th grader, who doesn’t have a driver’s license and can make a few basic dishes but isn’t used to cooking for himself, faced navigating his teenage years alone, his dad’s presence reduced to a two-dimensional image on his phone.

“I thought it wasn’t true,” Damian said. “I just went to my room. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t even want to eat.”

Damian is among an estimated , most of them U.S. citizens, separated from a parent by the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Their mothers and fathers have been deported or locked for months inside detention centers, often from where their families live. These children are separated, , from the adults they depend on. Parents have been arrested while , , and at immigration check-ins with their children present. Most people detained have . (Being in the U.S. without authorization is typically a civil offense). With their parents gone, kids’ lives are plunged into fear and uncertainty.

As a result, a generation of children from immigrant families are exhibiting mental health problems that could .

Parents, therapists, and others who work with immigrant families said they’ve already encountered preschoolers with speech delays, elementary school children who talk of suicide, and teenagers too anxious to leave the house. Research has shown repeatedly that separating children from their parents . The stress of losing a primary caregiver creates havoc in a child’s brain and body, increasing their risk for mental and physical health problems, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, a weakened immune system, and developmental delays.

“You can just see it in their faces; it’s almost like the light has been dimmed in their eyes,” said the Rev. Tanya Lopez, a pastor at Downey Memorial Christian Church who regularly visits immigrant families as part of a made up of Los Angeles-area religious leaders.

The health risks from this stress response are long-term. People who experience parental separation and other traumatic events as children are heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic conditions as adults.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE does not separate families, and that parents are asked if they want to be removed from the country with their children or to designate a safe person for them to stay with in the U.S.

However, by the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights found that many parents aren’t given that choice, and that ICE often doesn’t ask detainees if they have children or take steps to ensure that children left behind are safe. Saúl Zermeño said ICE officers didn’t ask about his son or check on Damian’s well-being when he was deported.

Two men sit at a table in front of a birthday cake as they smile for a portrait
Damian Zermeño at a birthday celebration a few months before his dad, Saúl Zermeño (right), was deported to Mexico. Damian is one of an estimated hundreds of thousands of children separated from a parent by the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Many of these children suffer mental and emotional health problems as a result. (Claudia Zermeño)

For days after his father’s deportation, Damian didn’t want to leave his room, eat, or go to school. He stopped talking to his friends. He stopped playing his favorite video game, Fears To Fathom. When he returned to school a week later, the teenager would cry in class or walk out overwhelmed with sadness. Even his favorite subject — English — lost its appeal.

Damian and his father were inseparable; family members joked that they never saw one without the other. Zermeño took Damian, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, and other health conditions, to his medical appointments. He cooked for him and combed his hair. He loved to take Damian to his favorite Thai restaurant or to get boba drinks after school. As much as they joked around and played pranks on each other, Zermeño also taught Damian the importance of work by bringing him along to construction jobs and to find supplies at Home Depot.

Damian used to get annoyed with his father’s motivational chats about responsibility. Now they’re one of the things he misses most.

“I thank my dad every day for teaching me to be strong before he left,” Damian said.

A man holds a smartphone with an image of a video chat with another man
Damian talks to his father over video chat. Saúl, a single parent, was deported to Mexico in October after living 36 years in the United States. Now, the only way the two see each other is through a screen. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, Jacob, a shy 9-year-old with cropped, curly hair, skinny limbs, and a serious expression, was missing his mom. On a Saturday in May, he clung tightly to his father’s hand as they walked among homeless people, street peddlers, and the stench of urine that hangs in the air outside the building where they live in a cramped apartment. He hoped his mom would soon be released from immigration detention so that he could hug her again.

“If my mom was here, I’d be happy,” he said. “Right now, I’m not.”

Jacob is in some ways a typical 9-year-old. He likes playing Roblox and Street Fighter. He dreams of becoming a police officer and of owning a guard dog, “because you can train them and they defend you.”

But he also endured a harrowing journey, even before being separated from his mom in January. Jacob’s family fled their home country of Colombia in 2024 because members of a paramilitary group threatened to kill them, his father, Andreis, said. During their journey to the United States, Jacob saw dead bodies while trekking through the jungle, was kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint with his parents, witnessed a rape, and had to sell candy and beg for money, his dad said. 51ÊÓƵ Health News is not using the father’s or son’s real name because the family fears it would jeopardize their asylum cases.

After the family arrived in Los Angeles, Jacob suffered from nightmares and an intense fear of being alone. He started to recover once he began attending school and got connected to therapy through the school district, his dad said. For a short while, the family felt they had found peace.

Then, immigration officers detained Jacob’s mother at a check-in appointment while he and Andreis sat in the waiting room. The mother has a pending asylum application and no criminal record, Andreis said. The father said he and his son broke down when officers informed them of his wife’s detention, handing them a bag with her wallet and cellphone. They returned home without her, leaving Jacob inconsolable.

“He was terrified,” the father said, fighting back tears, his voice growing quiet as he recounted that moment. “He was crying with rage.”

After that, Jacob didn’t want to eat or go to school. When he went to school at his dad’s insistence, his teacher called home to ask why he was crying in class. Jacob couldn’t sleep. He acted out. He blamed his dad.

“When will my mom come back?” he asked his dad. “Why do they have my mom? I miss my mom.”

At the same time, Andreis said, he was going through his own crisis, trying in vain to console his son while wrestling with grief, worry, and desperation over what happened to his wife. He stopped his work as a laborer for two weeks to take care of Jacob, but that created financial stress and meant he sometimes couldn’t afford to fund his wife’s commissary account so she could buy better food and make phone calls. Jacob lived for those phone calls.

Jacob listed all the things he missed about his mom, including her cooking (rice with meat, corn cakes with egg), visiting the park together, and her taking him to get his hair cut, treating him to McDonald’s on the weekend, and bringing him to church. Most of all, he missed being close to her.

“I would lie down with her, and I’d watch videos with her,” he said. “My mom would hug me and I’d hug her.”

Sometimes he sprayed her perfume on himself so he could smell her.

After almost five months at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, Jacob’s mother was released based on a habeas corpus petition in May. The family is still living in fear of detention or deportation. The father worries he too could be detained, and what that would mean for Jacob. Andreis is currently appealing a removal order for the two of them.

A published by the Brookings Institution estimates that over 200,000 children — including 145,000 U.S. citizen children — have likely had at least one parent detained since President Donald Trump returned to office. About a third of those children are under age 6. The number of children with detained parents is expected to grow as the federal government pours over $200 billion into immigration enforcement, including funding from the GOP’s and a appropriation Trump signed this month.

More than 4.6 million U.S. citizen children live with a parent at risk of deportation, according to the report.

Families Broken

Noemi, a Guatemalan mother and asylum seeker, stood in the parking lot at an ICE office north of Los Angeles, her three children wailing and clinging to her, glass from the family’s car scattered at their feet.

Moments earlier, immigration agents had smashed a window and forced her partner out of the car while he waited for Noemi and the kids to finish a check-in appointment. While they were inside, officers tried to separate Noemi from the couple’s children, ages 9, 7, and 1, but gave up after the kids started screaming, Noemi said. Meanwhile, her partner, a Mexican national who’s lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years, was sent to the ICE detention center in Adelanto.

“It was something tragic, something inexplicable that happened that day,” said Noemi, who asked to withhold her full name because she fears government retaliation for sharing her story. “It’s something that marks you for your whole life. My family was broken.”

Located in the Mojave Desert, the privately run Adelanto ICE Processing Center is the immigration detention center closest to Los Angeles and in the U.S. It held a daily average of as of April, and a facility next door called the Desert View Annex held an additional 426.

Since her partner’s detention in December, Noemi said, their children haven’t been the same.

Her 7-year-old daughter, till then usually happy and smiling, became depressed and refused to eat. Her once-high grades plummeted, and she forgot the names of letters and numbers in both English and Spanish. She and her 9-year-old brother struggled to sleep and asked constantly about their dad, wondering if he was taken because they’d done something wrong.

“Why is this happening to us?” they asked her. “We’re good. We’re studying.”

Noemi’s youngest daughter went back to crawling for three months, even though she’d already learned to walk before her father was taken. The little girl would cry out in her sleep, “Pa! Pa!”

Sofia Mendoza, a therapist who works with immigrant families at a community clinic in Los Angeles County, said separated children can experience a form of grief. It’s hard for them to come to terms with their parent’s absence because the parent is still alive, but not with them. This can disrupt the child’s bond with that parent and their ability to form trusting relationships in the future, she said.

Many children also become extremely anxious, angry, and fearful, Mendoza said. Young children often complain of physical symptoms such as stomachaches, develop separation anxiety, and regress to earlier behaviors like bed-wetting. Older children may have panic attacks, nightmares, and difficulty focusing, Mendoza said. Caregiver loss is also associated with and substance use in children.

Norma Gómez, a project manager for the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project in Oxnard, said after immigration raids shook the community last summer, her 9-year-old daughter refused to go to school for a week and was afraid to leave her mom and dad, even though they’re legal U.S. residents. She’d seen other kids at school crying because family members had been detained. Gómez showed her daughter their U.S. residency documents to reassure her. The child asked to make copies for her classmates, hoping they would protect them too.

‘Time To Be an Adult’

Back in East Los Angeles, Damian is living with one of his aunts and struggling to adapt to not having his father around. He said his grades have dropped because he can’t focus in school. He no longer wants to do things he used to enjoy with his dad, such as going out to eat.

“Fun is over,” he said. “It’s time to be an adult right now.”

A man and woman embrace as they stand in front of a window and pose for a portrait
Damian embraces his aunt Claudia Zermeño, who has taken legal guardianship of him since his father was deported to Mexico. She’s caring for him, her two children, and her mother. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)
Two women stand in front of a sink and a window as they prepare food in a kitchen
Damian’s aunts prepare lunch at the home the 15-year-old shared with his dad. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)
A man and woman stand in front of a sink and an open window as they prepare food in a kitchen
The two women have stepped in to take care of Damian, who has numerous health issues, since their brother was deported. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)

Being without his father has forced Damian to become more independent, he and his aunt Claudia Zermeño said. Before, his dad did almost everything for him. Now, Damian does his own laundry, helps with housework, and styles his own hair. He’s protective of his aunts, who are both devastated by their brother’s absence; he hugs them frequently and tells jokes to try to cheer them up. He doesn’t want to upset them more by showing his own sadness.

Damian receives therapy both in and outside of school. He said he’s learned breathing exercises that have helped, but he still feels sad and worried a lot of the time. Sometimes he feels angry.

“I try my hardest to think, to stay focused,” he said. “But with everything that’s going on, I can’t keep the facade of ‘everything’s normal’ when I feel heartbroken.”

Saúl Zermeño, now living in Guadalajara, said he’s worried about his son’s health. Damian has a genetic condition called , which causes tumors to grow on nerve tissue in his body, including one in his head that, if not checked regularly by a doctor and monitored by his family, could interfere with his brain. He also suffers from epilepsy and was born with only one kidney, which means he tires easily and doesn’t play sports. Saúl is afraid his son won’t get the care he needs without him there. As Damian’s legal guardian, Claudia Zermeño is doing everything she can for him, but she has two children of her own and is also caring for her mother, who has neurological problems from a stroke.

Damian talks with his dad as often as he can. He hopes to visit his father in Mexico, but he doesn’t have a passport and, as a minor under 16, there are more requirements to get one without his dad present. Saúl is working with an attorney to get permission to legally return to the U.S., but the process is complicated and uncertain.

So, for now, Damian’s hanging on to hope that his dad will be allowed to return and is trying to become the man he believes he should be. He’s making plans to get his driver’s license when he turns 16 this month. He’s given up his goal of going to college and instead wants to get a job right after high school to help his aunts and send money to his dad.

He still cries, but only when he’s alone in his room.

A person holds a smartphone as they sit on a bed
Damian talks to his father over video chat. (Karla Gachet for 51ÊÓƵ Health News)
51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

]]> 2249688 Festering Infections to Untreated Cancer: ICE Detainees Describe Medical Neglect Across US /courts/ice-immigration-detention-medical-care-neglect-court-records-ap-investigation/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000 An Albanian man’s pain grew so unbearable, he said, he pulled out his own tooth as he languished for months in a New Mexico immigration detention center. A Honduran mother of two said she was hospitalized for a heart problem after she was denied blood pressure medications while held in Florida. A said his leg grew purple and swollen from flesh-eating bacteria when staffers at a Vermont facility did not bring him to a scheduled doctor appointment.

Hundreds of detainees across at least 33 states allege in federal suits that immigration detention facilities are failing to provide adequate medical care, an investigation by 51ÊÓƵ Health News and The Associated Press found. Detainees say they didn’t get medications on time — or at all — for conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and HIV. Requests for help went unanswered for weeks. Blood sugars rose. Infections festered. Cancers remained untreated. Detainees collapsed and had seizures.

U.S. jails and immigration detention centers have to meet the medical needs of the people in their charge. But the system is sagging under an influx of detentions since President Donald Trump returned to office: More than 75,000 immigrants were being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement , up from around 40,000 a year earlier.

51ÊÓƵ Health News and AP analyzed thousands of court cases filed since Trump’s second inauguration that use a legal route known as habeas corpus to argue people are being held illegally by ICE. The records offer a rare window into how those detained say, often under penalty of perjury, ICE is handling their medical needs. Reporters also interviewed more than 50 detainees, family members, and lawyers.

The investigation revealed that medical neglect is alleged across the sprawling detention system, including in offices not designed to house people, county jails, and quickly staged sites with nicknames such as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

ICE custody is deadlier than it has been in two decades, researchers wrote in April. The Department of Homeland Security reported 51 people had died in detention since the start of Trump’s second administration — with suicides .

51ÊÓƵ Health News and AP asked DHS to respond to the findings six days before publication, but it did not provide comment. The department’s acting chief medical officer, Sean Conley, has “it is both policy and longstanding practice for aliens to receive timely and appropriate medical care from the moment they enter ICE custody” and that the agency recruits healthcare professionals to maintain high standards. “This is better, more responsive healthcare than many aliens have ever received in their entire lives,” he has said.

Individual facilities and private prison companies contracting with DHS that responded to requests for comment said they follow ICE standards and detainees receive medical care when it is required. Some said they were unfamiliar with the allegations outlined in court documents; others blamed some detainees for lapses in their medical care.

“I have never seen such disregard or medical neglect like this anywhere,” Vardan Gukasian, a political dissident and former paramedic who spent years behind bars in Armenia, wrote in in March to contest his detention in Henderson, Nevada, as it stretched to 13 months despite health problems.

Madeleine Skains, a spokesperson for the city of Henderson, said medical care is always available at the facility and that the court had not ordered changes to his care.

Last June, as Gukasian experienced the symptoms of uncontrolled high blood pressure — dizziness, a nosebleed, and a headache — his cellmate banged on their door for help.

“When it did not arrive, the rest of the block banged on their doors,” he wrote. Gukasian was hospitalized that day.

‘Brazen Indifference to Really Obvious Problems’

The administration’s mass deportation effort has swept up during routine immigration check-ins, at traffic stops, at their homes, and in hospitals.

About have no criminal conviction. Their immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal.

“I couldn’t understand why they treated me so harshly,” said a father of six in Georgia. He said he was injured while shackled in custody when the vehicle transporting him to an Atlanta facility jolted, throwing him out of his seat and into a metal armrest. His wound became infected with E. coli, he said, because he had to sleep on a dirty concrete floor amid leaking toilets.

Like other detainees interviewed, he spoke on the condition of anonymity; they said they fear for their safety, for the safety of their families, or that speaking out would jeopardize their immigration cases. The AP and 51ÊÓƵ Health News are not naming anyone identified in court documents without their consent.

Staffers at Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, didn’t adequately respond to that man’s request for medical help, , until he passed out and was taken to a hospital about an hour away. There, he said, a doctor told him he’d narrowly escaped amputation of his left leg. Medical staff found no records of a case matching this description, according to Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs the facility.

The 48-year-old, who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala more than two decades ago, was released in October and is now a legal permanent resident. But he is unsure if he’ll be able to return to his job in construction because, he said, he can no longer lift heavy things due to his injury.

A man in the Atlanta area was injured while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and developed an E. coli infection. “I couldn’t understand why they treated me so harshly,” says the father of six U.S. citizens, who is now a legal permanent resident but did not want to be named to avoid potential retaliation against his family. (Brynn Anderson/AP)

Some detainees or their lawyers said even basic care was denied: gauze to protect an open foot wound, prenatal care for a high-risk pregnancy, a pillow to ease the pain of sleeping with advanced stomach cancer, sanitary pads for postpartum bleeding.

“I would like to believe the government has the best interest of those it holds in detention for whatever period of time,” Judge Benita Pearson, a federal judge in Ohio, said during a hearing in October concerning a 70-year-old who alleged the government lost her glasses during her arrest. “If one is unable to see due to the loss of glasses when detained, that should be fixed.”

, who worked for ICE and now serves as a special adviser to the American Bar Association, said case law requires the government to treat people in immigration detention with the same care it affords those in traditional jails awaiting trial. But administrators are granted discretion and medical care standards vary.

Detainees are frequently moved across the country, often without warning, interrupting treatment. A woman from El Salvador said she missed a week of HIV medication when she was transferred from Colorado to a county jail in Wyoming.

A Russian man wrote that, while detained in Texas, he saw a gastroenterologist about his painful gallstones and scheduled an appointment with a surgeon. “Unfortunately, I never got to see him, due to my being moved around various detention centers.”

Advocates say that even obvious disabilities, like legal blindness, are ignored.

A detainee who lost one eye and had severe glaucoma in the other required twice-daily drops to maintain what vision remained. But, he said, some days the drops never came.

“Now I can only see a little bit straight in front. It now often looks like I’m seeing through gauze,” the man wrote in a court declaration. “This makes me very afraid that one of these times I am going to open my eyes and not be able to see anything at all.”

He wrote that he was scared he wouldn’t be able to see his infant son grow up.

“It’s just sort of brazen indifference to really obvious problems, things you would have thought absurd a decade ago — like the fact that you can’t see,” the man’s attorney, Brian Hoffman, said. “Before, you could attempt to work with folks on the government side and maybe shame them into doing the right thing. Now, it’s sort of like anything you want done you have to go to court and sue over.”

Even court orders aren’t always enough. One California judge ordered the government to take a man showing signs of prostate cancer to a specialist for diagnosis and treatment. Records show they did not take him.

Lawyers representing ICE told the judge that officials missed the appointment because of an “internal scheduling error.” CoreCivic, which runs that facility, said it was unable to comment on active litigation.

A Surge in Cases

When immigrants file habeas corpus petitions, they exercise a right to challenge unlawful imprisonment that dates to .

More than 40,000 such petitions have been filed during Trump’s second term, fueled by decisions last year to deny bond to many people held on immigration charges. Judges are split on whether that’s legal; the question appears headed to the Supreme Court.

Many habeas claims , but judges typically cite reasons unrelated to the medical neglect described in the petitions, such as detainees’ being held too long before being deported.

The more than 300 medical neglect claims found in this investigation represent a fraction of the problem. The details of habeas corpus cases are often hidden due to a federal rule barring the public from viewing such documents online. 51ÊÓƵ Health News and AP obtained some documents from courthouses and received records on 4,400 cases from , a project of the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative. But tens of thousands more remain largely inaccessible.

Some judges have written that the habeas process is not how to raise allegations of medical neglect and have declined to release detainees over those claims. Not every detainee who believes they experienced medical neglect files a habeas petition or cites their medical issues if they do.

Jose-Antonio Segismundo’s petition made no mention of being unable to see an oncologist for the cancer in his abdomen while detained for more than seven months at the Florida detention facility known as Alligator Alcatraz and Folkston D Ray ICE Processing Center in Georgia. Medical records in his court filings show he was arrested about five weeks before his scheduled appointment with a cancer specialist.

His wife, Maria Jose Gonzalez, said he didn’t receive any treatment even though she sent his medical records and explained his condition to officials at Folkston. When his stomach pain erupted, often suddenly and intensely, she said, they gave him Tylenol.

Geo Group, which runs Folkston, follows ICE standards and provides healthcare and access to off-site medical specialists when needed, spokesperson Christopher Ferreira said.

This spring, Segismundo, 48, was deported to Mexico, a country he left nearly 30 years ago, Gonzalez said. Now, she said, he will have to restart his search for care in the Oaxacan village where he grew up.

Maria Jose Gonzalez of Wimauma, Florida, holds a photo of her husband, Jose-Antonio Segismundo, who was detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for more than seven months in Florida and Georgia before being deported to Mexico. Medical records show he was arrested about five weeks before his scheduled appointment with a specialist to treat his abdominal cancer. (Chris O'Meara/AP)

Watching Loved Ones Deteriorate

Detainees receiving inadequate healthcare have little recourse. The Department of Homeland Security last year gutted the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. In early May, it shut the office entirely, arguing that Congress didn’t fund it.

Previously, ombudsman staffers could help facilitate medical care or look into complaints of neglect, according to Matt Boles, an immigration attorney in Georgia. Now, he said, there’s no one to call.

Meanwhile, detainees’ families said they feel helpless, making desperate calls to facilities, the government, and their legislators while watching their loved ones deteriorate.

Riya Khan saw her mother get sicker at the California City Detention Facility, which is owned by CoreCivic. When she visited a week after her mother arrived at the facility in the Mojave Desert, Riya said, the 64-year-old woman stumbled into her seat. She was shaking and her breathing was labored.

Masuma Khan came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1997. She has no criminal history, her records say, and was detained in October when she showed up for her regular ICE check-in.

For the month she was detained, according to her daughter, she only intermittently received her medications for conditions including high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, and prediabetes. CoreCivic treats chronic conditions in line with applicable medical standards, Todd said.

“Nothing matters more to CoreCivic than the health, safety and well-being of the people in our care,” Todd said.

Khan said she got her asthma medication for the first time two days before she was released and that her eye drops for glaucoma never arrived. Staffers told Khan she needed to buy some of her medications from the commissary but it didn’t stock them, her daughter said.

Before ICE detained Masuma Khan, she made friends with everyone, her daughter said. She had worked for years at Lucky Boy, an iconic Pasadena fast-food restaurant, and in her free time fed birds and left out fruit for bees that visited her apartment’s balcony.

Now she’s too scared to go outside. She still must regularly check in with ICE, and she’s terrified each time.

Masuma Khan (center) waits in line with her attorney Laboni Hoq (left of Khan) to enter a federal building in Los Angeles for an appointment on April 21. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khan (second from right in the front row) and her daughter, Riya (fourth from right in the front row), pose with supporters outside a federal building in Los Angeles on April 21. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khan (right) came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1997 and was detained for a month after she showed up for a regular check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in October. Here, she hugs her daughter, Riya (left). (Jae C. Hong/AP)
A “Welcome Home” balloon that was left at the front door of Khan’s apartment in Altadena, California, after she was released from an immigration detention facility. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khan’s daughter says that her mother has nightmares and is scared to go outside after being held at an immigration detention facility for a month in 2025. (Jae C. Hong/AP)

    A Stroke on a Video Call

    Previously, detainees with serious medical needs would likely have been released on humanitarian parole, in part to avoid the cost of their care, Vermont attorney Andrew Pelcher said.

    In fiscal year 2023 — before the detained population soared — ICE spent more than $390 million on healthcare for detained noncitizens, according to its to Congress. In May, Todd Lyons, then acting director of ICE, said at a conference that the agency had already spent “almost half a billion dollars” on detainee healthcare this year.

    Now, under “mandatory detention,” people are staying locked up with serious — and expensive — conditions.

    A Romanian citizen underwent several heart surgeries, including an emergency triple bypass in April 2025, before he was arrested in July. As part of his recovery, the 52-year-old was required to take 16 daily medications. While at an ICE field office in Baltimore, his court filings allege, he went two days without any medication before officials moved him to a facility in New Jersey.

    He was hospitalized three times while detained, complaining of chest pains — in part, medical records and court documents say, because despite “countless requests,” the detention center did not provide all his medications. Hospital discharge papers cited by his lawyer show he received only eight of the 16 medications after his second release from the hospital.

    “Can you please talk to the ICE facility to make sure they give him his medications?” his treatment providers wrote in medical records included in his court filings. “He was admitted last week for chest pain and today he was readmitted again for chest pain secondary to non compliance for medications.”

    Several weeks later in August, he had a stroke while on a video call with his daughter, according to court filings. “He was struggling to breathe, and was pointing at his chest where he was again experiencing pain, and suddenly stopped speaking.” His daughter screamed for help through the video monitor, according to his petition. “Eventually an officer came in to assist him and cut the feed.”

    The man lost his ability to speak for four days, the document says. He was returned to detention, where he remained until a federal judge ordered his release in November.

    Khan holds medication she takes daily. While detained, she says, she only intermittently received her medications for multiple conditions including high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, and prediabetes. (Jae C. Hong/AP)

    Impossible Choices

    Cassandra Amador waits for the phone to ring every morning, desperate to ask her husband the question that’s woken her up every night for months: “Did you get your medicine?”

    Her husband, Pedro Javier Amador Gutierrez, 36, has high blood pressure and depends on the state-run facility in Florida nicknamed “Deportation Depot” to administer the prescriptions that have kept him alive for years. Many mornings, he tells his wife he did not get them.

    When she talks to him, she said, he sounds weaker and more scared every day, not like the upbeat man who would take her kids out for ice cream.

    “You can hear in his voice how he feels,” she said.

    Now, she said, he’s considering returning to Cuba, which he fled because of political persecution, out of fear that he will die in detention without his medicines. Amador and her children would go with him, she said, even though she was born in New Jersey, has never been to Cuba, and doesn’t speak much Spanish.

    But he’s already collapsed twice at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, Florida, his wife said. She’s terrified that the next time, he won’t get up.

    Methodology

    51ÊÓƵ Health News and The Associated Press sifted through thousands of immigration habeas corpus claims to find allegations of medical neglect from people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the second Trump administration.

    Without a comprehensive, publicly available dataset of medical complaints by those in ICE custody, we used immigration habeas corpus claims to identify detainees’ healthcare-related allegations raised in federal court. Although the intended purpose of habeas corpus is to challenge the legality of a petitioner’s detention — rather than conditions of their confinement — these filings sometimes include detainees’ claims of inadequate healthcare.

    But habeas corpus filings are not always publicly available. Federal rules restrict how members of the public can access habeas petitions filed by people in immigration detention. For most of these cases, court websites publish only court orders and dockets describing other filings. The initial petitions are available only through in-person visits to federal courthouses across the country. Habeas Dockets, a project of the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative, coordinates a nationwide network of volunteers to gather these petitions and make them available online.

    51ÊÓƵ Health News and AP analyzed the dockets of roughly 33,000 cases filed by detainees from Jan. 20, 2025, through March 2026. The vast majority of cases had only basic procedural information, like dates of court filings and rulings. Only about 4,400 included the original petitions.

    We also gathered a few dozen case files from courthouses, lawyers, and the Massachusetts federal district court website, which posts most petitions under a unique standing order.

    We ran keyword and semantic searches of court records, including petitions, motions, and orders, for terms and phrases potentially related to medical neglect, such as surgery, medications, inadequate medical care, and treatment for chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

    We found about 500 cases potentially alleging medical neglect. At least two reporters reviewed each case manually, yielding more than 300 cases containing specific allegations in sworn filings of delayed, denied, or deficient healthcare.

    To be conservative, we excluded dozens of cases that alleged inadequate medical care but lacked specifics, for example a petitioner writing, “I have been sick and don’t get proper treatment,” or a judge noting a petitioner “complains that ICE is ignoring his medical problems.” We also excluded cases in which petitioners claimed only that they were denied special diets, exercise, or other accommodations that they said were key to managing their health conditions, such as a petitioner writing, “I suffer from Parkinson’s and cannot properly exercise,” or claiming that the food provided was unfit for a person with diabetes.

    The cases we analyzed were neither randomly selected nor representative of immigration habeas filings nationwide. The claims were not independently verified. Many filings are not publicly available, and not all detainees raise medical concerns in court, so our account of cases represents a limited window into the landscape of claims, rather than a comprehensive picture.

    Associated Press journalists Garance Burke, Valerie Gonzalez, and Tim Sullivan as well as 51ÊÓƵ Health News correspondent Kate Wells contributed to this report.

    This report is a collaboration between The Associated Press and 51ÊÓƵ Health News.

    51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

    This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

    ]]>     2243229     A Trump Stronghold Grapples With Health Risks of ICE Detention Sites /race-and-health/ice-detention-center-social-circle-georgia-lawsuit-trump-stronghold/ Fri, 29 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — Until recently, this rural city about 45 minutes east of Atlanta was best known for its Blue Willow Inn cookbooks featuring recipes for Southern dishes such as baked pineapple casserole and kudzu blossom jelly.

    Lately, however, the community has been trying to stave off a new identity of “prison town” as it fights the opening of what could become the nation’s largest immigration detention center, holding up to 10,000 people.

    Walton County, home to this city of about 5,500, voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump in 2024. But, as the administration’s mass deportation strategy hits closer to home — with plans moving forward to transform a more than 1 million-square-foot warehouse into a holding pen — locals say the city’s infrastructure just can’t handle such an influx of people.

    This month, Social Circle in federal court against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The city’s complaint argues that the operation of a detention facility, what it calls a “mega center,” would harm public health, strain the local freshwater and sewage treatment systems, and overburden emergency medical services “due to Social Circle’s modest EMS capacity and DHS’ nebulous plan for emergency transport,” referring to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

    “The community is very unified,” City Manager Eric Taylor said. “We want them to go away.”

    Social Circle is one of several communities across the country thrust into a charged national debate about the administration’s mass immigrant deportation strategy. On the campaign trail, Trump said migrants were . But local leaders, , advocacy groups, and others in , , , , and claim the administration is doing the same thing by plopping detention centers into communities without the capacity to handle a surge of people.

    Last year, Todd Lyons, who is serving as acting director of ICE , described a goal to have the mass deportation operate with the . Deportations would move “like Prime, but with human beings,” he said at a border security expo in Phoenix.

    ICE is now putting every person they seek to deport in detention, including those with no criminal records, without the possibility of release on bond. In January, the agency held almost twice as many people as it had that same month in 2024 under President Joe Biden.

    However, while many supporters remain aligned with Trump’s immigration stance, some locals fear their city’s stability will be jeopardized. “Social Circle is not exactly flourishing, but it’s making it,” said Gareth Fenley, a retired social worker who ran for state Senate in 2024 as a Democrat and was not among the locals who voted for Trump.

    “If Social Circle becomes a prison town,” she said, “we’re gonna lose what we have.”

    A strip of old, two-story buildings in a small town.
    Social Circle, a city of 5,500 people located about 45 miles east of Atlanta, has filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claiming that plans to open a massive ICE detention center could threaten the city’s public health and overburden its emergency medical services. (Renuka Rayasam/51ÊÓƵ Health News)
    A woman with long, wavy gray hair, wearing a floral blouse and glasses, sits at a table in a coffee shop. She looks in the direction of the camera with a calm expression.
    Gareth Fenley is a retired social worker who lives near Social Circle, Georgia. She ran for state Senate in 2024 as a Democrat and says the city’s concerns about a proposed immigration detention facility resemble those in other communities. (Renuka Rayasam/51ÊÓƵ Health News)

    ‘I Thought It Was a Joke’

    In February, DHS purchased the 235-acre site in Social Circle for nearly five times its assessed value. It plans to house more people there than at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York City, and nearly triple the number of people now housed at the country’s biggest immigration detention facility, which is in El Paso, Texas.

    “I thought it was a joke,” said John Miller, when he first read about the plans last year. He and his wife, Kathlene, have lived in Social Circle for 21 years. When they bump into neighbors, Kathlene knows their children’s names, and John can cite the kids’ baseball stats. Their 50-acre horse farm is less than a mile from the elementary school, and right across the street from the detention center site.

    The Millers support Trump’s stance on immigration but feel that turning the vacant warehouse into a detention center would re-create the very problems his administration is trying to solve. Whether people are concentrated in a detention center or out in the public, “they’re still there,” John Miller said.

    DHS estimates that the facility would require about 1 million gallons of water daily, according to the city’s suit, which alleges that volume would bleed residents’ taps dry and contaminate local streams with sewage. Emergency medical calls from the detention center, the lawsuit claims, would overwhelm the city’s first responders, which Taylor said clock in at 14 firefighters, 15 police officers, and two school resource officers. The city relies on Walton County for ambulance services.

    Additionally, Social Circle would live under an ever-present threat of a major disease outbreak, the lawsuit said, adding that the federal government didn’t conduct the needed environmental reviews or solicit community input beforehand.

    Taylor said federal officials had only one meeting with local leaders and brushed off concerns about water, sewage, and emergency care, which administration officials said the site wouldn’t need to use. “I don’t buy that,” Taylor said. “And that’s the problem.”

    A man with short brown hair wearing a button down shirt and glasses sits at an office desk. He is surrounded by two computers, papers and post-it notes, and a printer.
    John Miller sits in his office at JK Design in Social Circle, Georgia. He and his wife, Kathlene, moved to Social Circle 21 years ago and have raised seven kids. (Renuka Rayasam/51ÊÓƵ Health News)
    A photo shows an outdoor parking area of a small town. A sign on a lamp post reads, "welcome to Social Circle." A historic sign in the foreground tells the history of the Hightower Trail.
    Social Circle has filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claiming that plans to open a massive detention center could threaten the city’s public health and overburden its emergency medical services. (Renuka Rayasam/51ÊÓƵ Health News)

    Supercharging Health Concerns

    Current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said he is reviewing , Kristi Noem, to transform warehouses like this one into detention facilities. And the department’s whether the federal government overpaid for some of the buildings. Mullin also said officials are reviewing agency policies and working with community leaders. “We want to be good partners,” said Lauren Bis, a DHS spokesperson.

    Still, the administration’s swift escalation of immigrant detention has exacerbated long-standing allegations of medical neglect for those in custody across the country and led to the in at least two decades.

    Three detention facilities in Folkston, Georgia, about an hour north of Jacksonville, Florida, issued 130 emergency calls from Feb. 4, 2025, to Feb. 3, 2026, according to dispatch reports obtained by 51ÊÓƵ Health News through a public records request. The calls from the facilities, which hold about 2,000 people, were for wide-ranging reasons, including anaphylaxis, assaults, suicide attempts, overdoses, seizures, strokes, head injuries from falls, and other health issues.

    GEO Group, ICE’s largest contractor, which runs the Folkston facility, provides “around-the-clock access to medical care” and relies on emergency medical services as needed, said Christopher Ferreira, director of corporate relations.

    ERO El Paso Camp East Montana, built on a Texas military base, is currently the nation’s largest detention center and holds about 2,500 people. In the five months from Aug. 17, 2025, to Jan. 20, 2026, about 130 emergency medical calls were made from the site, according to city records. Several detainees have died at the facility; several others have for tuberculosis, measles, or covid-19.

    Amentum Services, which recently took over management of the facility, did not respond to questions about emergency calls.

    Even bigger detention facilities, such as the “mega center” planned in Social Circle, would only supercharge those health issues and bring them to new communities, said , who was immigration ombudsman at the Department of Homeland Security under Biden. Existing facilities already suffer from staffing shortages, poor ventilation and hygiene, and insufficient medical care, she said.

    The proposed facilities are enormous and generally built for boxes, not people, she said. “There’s no way, without extreme cost, both to the community and just in dollars, to make these safe for humans,” she said.

    In the meantime, people such as Kathlene Miller said they feel that Social Circle has become “collateral damage” in the larger debate over immigration. “We’re like the children in a divorce,” she said.

    But Social Circle may face an uphill battle. Taylor said Walton County leaders and the state of Georgia have been silent on the center.

    “They say it’s federal issues, that they have no jurisdiction,” he said. “They don’t have any interest in helping us.”

    51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

    This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

    ]]>     2242430     Trump Demands Medicaid Data for Deportation. Some States Go a Step Further. /medicaid/medicaid-immigrants-deportation-state-data-legislation-north-carolina/ Thu, 14 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Several states have joined President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts and are taking federal reporting requirements to immigration authorities a step further — by using their public health agencies as arms of enforcement.

    North Carolina, in late April, became the latest member of a growing group of Republican-led states to require their public health agencies to flag recipients of Medicaid to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security if their legal status is in question.

    It’s a trend health policy researchers expect to spread among GOP-controlled states eager to join Trump in the federal crackdown on Medicaid fraud and illegal immigration. Already, at least four states — , , , and — have passed similar laws, and lawmakers in others, such as and , are weighing measures. In those six states, Republicans hold a power trifecta — both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office.

    “This is an issue that is very much on the political radar right now,” said , a health policy researcher at Harvard Law School.

    More than 75 million people , the federal and state-run public health program for people with disabilities and low incomes, or its related Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides low-cost coverage for people under 19. Immigrants without legal status are ineligible for Medicaid benefits, but a swath of noncitizens qualify, such as green-card holders, asylees, and refugees. A quarter of children in the U.S., most of them citizens, live with an immigrant.

    Yet the new reporting laws add a layer of risk for immigrants seeking healthcare in the U.S., where the the use of to help identify and deport people.

    Some of the state laws apply only to health agencies, such as in North Carolina. But the bill headed to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s desk , requiring all state agencies to report people suspected of being in the U.S. without legal status. All seven state measures go beyond what’s federally required, which is to cooperate with enforcement officers by providing personal information of recipients when asked.

    In Louisiana, families with mixed immigration statuses have reported that the state’s new law, enacted last year, for their kids with U.S. citizenship.

    “I expect this law will lead to more families asking whether it is safe to seek healthcare, whether information can be shared with immigration authorities, and whether enrolling a child or seeking treatment could expose them to enforcement consequences,” said , a North Carolina immigration attorney.

    North Carolina Republican lawmakers inserted their mandate for the state’s health department as part of a in Medicaid funds, which the legislature cut when it failed to pass a budget last year.

    Starting in October, state employees will ask non-U.S. citizens receiving Medicaid for proof of their immigration standing and report those without “satisfactory” legal status to federal authorities. “This bill is designed not only to fund our critical needs today, but to begin looking at fraud, abuse issues we know exist within the system,” Republican state Rep. Donny Lambeth said during a House debate on the bill.

    Immigrants than people born in the U.S., according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, which also found noncitizens are much less likely to than citizens. State health agencies are already required to verify whether applicants’ immigration statuses .

    Several Republican leaders responsible for the bill did not respond to requests for comment. North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Hannah Jones said the agency is still trying to understand the impact of the new law.

    , about half of adults who “likely” lack legal status said someone in their family has avoided seeking medical care because they were concerned their information could draw the attention of immigration enforcement.

    , a North Carolina discrimination attorney, said immigrants “in process,” or those waiting for legal authorization, generally already fear using government assistance for themselves.

    “What I’ve learned from handling thousands of cases over the years is that most of the individuals who are in process pay for their own medical treatment out-of-pocket,” Rosa said.

    Such policies essentially force children who are U.S. citizens to go without health coverage or hospital care, said , a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

    “When you do policies that target an immigrant, you may think that you are just targeting this one person in the family, but it’s a really imprecise bomb that takes out the whole household,” Cuello said.

    The use of states’ public health agencies to find immigrants who lack legal status is not the only strategy states have deployed. Some have passed laws looking to hospitals to collect and report such information. A 2023 Florida law that requires hospital staff to ask about patients’ immigration status has made noncitizens hesitant to seek care, separated families, and caused psychological distress, by the University of South Florida. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued an executive order similar to Florida’s law in 2024.

    Democratic states have pushed back against Trump administration policies that mine private medical information to target immigrants, with 21 signing on to a filed last year that attempts to prevent DHS from . recipients’ identities could be shared, but medical information could not. Litigation is ongoing.

    DHS did not respond to a request for comment on the record.

    After he signed the bill into law, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, urging Republican lawmakers to protect Medicaid coverage for nearly 27,000 pregnant women and children who are lawfully present in the country. He did not respond to questions about the provision that requires the state to report immigrants without legal status.

    Polanco-Galdamez said such laws have further eroded trust in healthcare systems among underserved families.

    “At the end of the day, public health systems function best when people feel safe seeking medical care,” Polanco-Galdamez said. “Policies that blur the line between healthcare access and immigration enforcement risk pushing vulnerable families further into the shadows.”

    51ÊÓƵ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51ÊÓƵ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

    This article first appeared on 51ÊÓƵ Health News and is republished here under a .

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