Fearful of falling into the grasps of Donald Trump’s mass deportation force, numerous police chiefs across the country have said that immigrant communities have stopped reporting when they’ve been the victims of rape and violent crime to local law enforcement. Now Daniel Bouton, director of the Community Council, says his nonprofit health organization is seeing similarly troubling signs that anti-immigrant policies are leading Latinos and immigrants to forgo health services altogether:
Bouton’s organization has helped a 52-year-old housekeeper from Mexico, a legal resident, sign up for federally subsidized health insurance for two years. But now she is going without, fearing that immigration officials will use her enrollment to track down her husband, who is in the country illegally. She is also considering not re-enrolling their children, 15 and 18, in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), even though they were born in the United States.
“We’re afraid of maybe getting sick or getting into an accident, but the fear of my husband being deported is bigger,” the woman, who declined to give their names because of fears about her husband’s status, said through an interpreter in a phone interview.
Hispanic immigrants are not only declining to sign up for health insurance under programs that began or expanded under Barack Obama’s presidency — they’re also not seeking treatment when they’re sick, Bouton and others say.
“One social worker said she had a client who was forgoing chemotherapy because she had a child that was not here legally,” said Oscar Gomez, chief executive of Health Outreach Partner, a national training and advocacy organization.
In other cases, social workers from Health Outreach Partner aren’t just trying to help people sign up for health insurance or access treatment, “they’re also fielding questions about immigration issues and drawing up contingency plans for when a family member is deported.”
As The Washington Post reports, “enticing Hispanics to take advantage of subsidized health care has been a struggle that began long before Trump’s presidency.” While the uninsured rate among Latinos dropped from 43 percent to less than 25 percent in the span of six years, enrollment among the group has continued to lag for reasons ranging from language barriers to immigration fears:
Hispanics are more than three times as likely to go without health insurance as are their white counterparts, according to a 2015 study by Pew Research Center. Whites represented 63 percent, or 3.8 million, of those who signed up for Affordable Care Act plans last year; Hispanics made up 15 percent, or just under 1 million, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The reasons vary, but some have always feared deportation, regardless of who is in the White House.
While the Obama administration tried to reassure families that no enrollment information would be used to target undocumented immigrants, the administration's record 2 million deportations left them nervous. Under Trump’s mass deportation agenda, they’re terrified:
Recent events have not helped. Despite initial signs of a compromise agreement, Trump now isn’t supporting a deal to support young people who identified themselves to the federal government so that they could qualify for protections against deportation after being brought to the United States illegally as children.
Last fall, Border Patrol agents followed a 10-year-old immigrant with cerebral palsy to a Texas hospital and took her into custody after she had surgery. She had been brought to the United States from Mexico when she was a toddler.
And in Okeechobee, a small city about an hour and a half north of Miami that is home to many immigrant farmworkers, green-and-white-striped immigration vehicles were spotted driving around town and parking in conspicuous places last spring and summer. After a few immigrants were picked up and deported, health advocates said patients canceled their appointments, waiting until immigration officials left to reschedule them.
“In Washington state and Florida, health-care workers report that immigrant patients start the enrollment process but drop out once they are required to turn in proof of income, Social Security and other personal information.” Of course, keeping people—especially brown ones—sick only hurts public health and safety overall, but it’s a sacrifice the Trump administration seems perfectly willing to make in order to further a mass deportation agenda.
