Immigration enforcement agencies are harming public health and safety while hospital CEOs refuse to side with nurses to protect patients

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Registered nurse members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association of RNs, are naming federal immigration enforcement agencies as among the country’s top public health threats, and demanding through national coordinated protests on Thursday, Feb. 19 that Congress stop funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and move to abolish ICE for the health and safety of patients and communities. Nurses also blame hospital executives for failing to clearly side with nurses and immigrant patients by acting to keep ICE out of hospitals.

“We are way past the point of ‘reform,’” said Mary Turner, an intensive care unit RN from Minneapolis, Minn. who is president of National Nurses United. “Reform only works when you care about abiding by and enforcing the law. Nurses make professional assessments and this is what we conclude: ICE and border patrol are violent, cruel, lawless, and racist organizations that the Trump administration is using as a paramilitary force to ultimately quash the American people’s opposition to his fascist takeover of our democracy. Our hospital CEOs are at fault, too, for enabling Trump by doing nothing. We all need to wake up and shut ICE down now before it is too late.”

Nurses outlined all the ways in which ICE, CPB, and other federal immigration enforcement agencies are harming and killing our patients and communities:

• Directly injuring, traumatizing, sickening, maiming, and even killing immigrants and U.S. citizens alike with their violent attacks and tactics, including assaulting people, indiscriminately tear gassing and shooting point-blank at people with so-called “less-than-lethal” weapons, and drawing firearms and shooting citizens.
• Preventing patients from seeking medical care and treatment by terrorizing Black, brown, Indigenous, and Asian American Pacific Islander people and communities defending them, as well as violating the sanctity of hospitals as places of healing by showing up and scaring patients and workers. In total, ICE is jeopardizing public health by blocking people who need medical care from getting it.
• Sickening, injuring, and killing people who are detained in immigration concentration camps by failing to provide humane living conditions, food and water, and medical care. Some 40 people have died in ICE custody since Trump’s crackdowns began in 2025, and ICE stopped paying outside medical care contracts in October 2025. Cases of highly contagious diseases such as measles have also been reported in detention.
• Intentionally and openly targeting non-white people for harassment, violence, and detainment. Through its racist and white supremacist agenda, ICE and other agencies are further endangering and traumatizing patients who already suffer from race-based obstacles to health and safety. 
• Stealing from programs like Medicaid, through passage of 2025’s budget bill H.R. 1, to waste more than $75 billion of taxpayer money to attack and harm the U.S. people, funds that could be used to care for us instead. 

“We nurses take an oath to always advocate for the health and safety of our patients, and that means not only at the bedside, but beyond: in our state capitals, in Washington, D.C., and out in our streets,” said Turner. “We can’t stress enough the public health danger that ICE and border patrol are posing to our patients and our communities. We are turning out on Feb. 19 to demand that Congress abolish ICE now, or face electoral consequences.” 

National Nurses United is the largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses in the United States with more than 225,000 members nationwide. NNU affiliates include California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, DC Nurses Association, Michigan Nurses Association, Minnesota Nurses Association, and New York State Nurses Association.