Dr. Kaitlin McLean offers a message to community members who have been avoiding health care facilities: “We want you to get the care you need. We are here asking the hospital to support us in caring for you.”
Health care facilities have not been spared the aggressive tactics deployed by federal agents during the recent surge of immigration enforcement in Minnesota. Now, local unions, immigrant-rights groups and lawmakers are demanding health systems adopt new “best practices” to keep patients and workers safe and uphold their rights.
Union nurses, doctors and support staff called a press conference Feb. 20 outside the U of M Medical Center after delivering a list of demands to Fairview, citing unanswered questions and persistent concerns about how the system is navigating the immigration chaos.
Kirby Crow, a Fairview Riverside worker and member of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, cataloged a list of incidents workers have witnessed at Fairview facilities, from agents covering up security cameras to verbally and physically intimidating health care workers – even following some to their homes.
“Despite a need for new, improved procedures, Fairview hasn’t offered workers any updated policies in the last few weeks,” Crow said. “So us workers stepped up.”
Workers’ top concern, speakers at the event said, is that community members are foregoing health care to avoid encounters with federal agents.
Kirby Crow, a member of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, catalogs the troubling incidents Fairview workers have seen in their facilities since the immigration surge began in late December.
Soon after Operation Metro Surge began in December, workers across the health care industry began sounding the alarm that immigrant patients were avoiding hospitals and clinics, deferring needed care and going without their medications.
“Our No. 1 priority will always be and has always been the safety and well being of our patients,” Dr. Kaitlin McLean, a member of Council of Interns and Residents (CIR-SEIU), said. “It is the hospitals’ job to allow us to do that safely. We need to know that the hospital has our back while we do that important work.”
A coalition of union doctors, nurses and health care workers at Fairview, working with the immigrant-rights group UNIDOS MN, drafted best practices that, they say, would offer assurances to patients fearful of seeking care.
Demands include alerting the public when immigration agents approach a Fairview facility. Workers also want Fairview to provide them with education about patients’ rights under civil detention, and clear protocols to follow when immigration agents arrive at their facilities. That includes requiring agents to sign in, remove any non-medical face coverings and stay out of private or secure areas unless they have a judicial warrant to enter.
“I wish I could tell you with absolute certainty that it is safe for you to leave your home sand come to the hospital,” McLean said. “We want you to get the care you need. We are here asking the hospital to support us in caring for you.”
The proposed best practices also would protect health care workers, barring agents from parking lots, break rooms and other staff spaces and allowing for immediate reassignment from areas immigration agents have entered.
The coalition also wants amendments to Fairview’s attendance policy that would accommodate workers experiencing immigration-related safety or legal emergencies.
“These are phenomenal health care workers that show up every day to serve as a vessel for healing and a helping hand for humanity,” Jamey Sharp, a health care organizer with UNIDOS MN, said.
UNIDOS is organizing with workers in other health care systems, including Hennepin Health Care and North Memorial, to establish strong protocols around immigration enforcement.
“Our goal is simple,” Sharp added. “Hospitals must be places of care, healing and trust – not fear.”
– Michael Moore, UA editor
Union Advocate 
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