The Brief

Federal immigration agents are more routinely showing up at California medical facilities as the Trump administration ramps up deportations.

They may come to the emergency room, bringing in someone who’s suffering a medical crisis while being detained. They may wait in the lobby, as agents did for two weeks at an L.A.-area hospital waiting for a woman to be discharged. Or they may even chase people inside, as federal agents did at a Southern California surgical center.

The sight of these agents — often armed and with covered faces — makes many wary and may keep people from seeking care.

Existing hospital policies guide operations when law enforcement brings in a person under arrest, hospital officials say.

“This is nothing new to hospitals,” said Lois Richardson, vice president and counsel at the California Hospital Association. “We get inmates, detainees, arrestees all the time, whether it's police, sheriff, highway patrol, ICE, whatever it is.” The job for hospital workers remains to provide care, she added, and not to get involved in disputes over why a person is in custody.

Yet immigration attorneys, advocates and health workers have expressed concerns over the handling of some of these cases, both by immigration officers and by some administrators at medical facilities.

Specifically, they’reworried about the application of protocols like visitation rules, about threats to patients’ legal and privacy rights, and about risks to hospital workers themselves.

“We have a level of privacy that we owe to patients and their families, and that has just been completely demolished with all of the involvement of ICE coming into hospitals,” said Kate Mobeen, an ICU nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Concord. “It creates just a huge sense of fear, not only in our patient population, but in our employee population and our nurses.”

Patients' rights, policies face new tests

Sometimes when ICE has shown up at medical facilities with a detained patient, the result has been conflicting messaging about the rules.

On July 29, ICE agents took a man to John Muir Medical Center in Concord because he suffered an unspecified medical emergency while being detained outside the Concord immigration court, according to Ali Saidi, an attorney and the director of Stand Together Contra Costa, a local rapid response and legal services organization.

When Saidi arrived at the hospital as part of the response network, he said hospital staff told him that he was not allowed to see the detained patient, but that the man’s family would be allowed. Then, when the man’s wife arrived, “The rules had somehow changed, and they said no family visit,” Saidi said.

In a statement shared by the Contra Costa Immigrants Rights Alliance, the detained man’s wife, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, Maria, said that when she later talked to her husband, he told her that he was so terrified that he passed out.

“My family and I went to the emergency room and we asked to see him and talk to him to make sure he was okay,” Maria said, in the statement. “The hospital staff would not let us see him and they would not give us any information about what was happening to him. They wouldn’t even answer my questions.”

John Muir officials would not comment on the incident, citing privacy laws. But in an email, Ben Drew, a spokesperson for the hospital, said general policy is that “If a law enforcement agency indicates that visitation presents a safety or security concern, [the hospital] may limit or deny visitation to protect our patients, staff, and visitors.”

Saidi said that when the wife insisted on getting information about the man’s condition, hospital security called the police.

“We understand that emotions are high whenever a family member or friend is in the emergency department or hospital,” said Drew. “The hospital only involves local police in circumstances when a patient or visitor’s behavior becomes abusive, disruptive, or threatening, and cannot be resolved through our own security team.”

Saidi denied that the family was being disruptive, saying that conversations with hospital staff and administration were respectful and no voices were raised.

“The atmosphere in that emergency bay was something like I’ve never seen before in my career,” Saidi said. “There was a chilling effect. Everyone was averting their eyes. You could tell the staff felt bad.”

Multiple emergency department nurses told Mobeen, a local California Nurses Association leader at John Muir, that ICE officers were “very aggressive with staff” and staff were afterwards “emotionally and physically upset” by what happened, she said.

“It’s horrifying to not be able to tell patients’ family members how they are, what their status is,” Mobeen said.

Part of the issue, Mobeen added, is training. Staff were not given adequate training on how to respond to any kind of immigration enforcement action that may occur at the hospital, she said.

Drew, the spokesman for John Muir, countered that the hospital has given guidance on its longstanding law enforcement policy and answered multiple questions since January about what to do if ICE agents show up at their facilities.

Limits for ICE access, sometimes murky

Last month, immigration agents occupied the lobby of Dignity Health’s Glendale Memorial Hospital, even standing behind reception desks, as photos that circulated online showed. Protestors gathered outside the hospital hosting rallies and press conferences.

They were all there because agents had previously brought in Milagro Solis-Portillo, an immigrant from El Salvador, for medical care following her detention. They spent 15 days in the hospital waiting for Solis-Portillo’s discharge before transferring her to another hospital and then taking her into custody, according to local news reports.

In a statement, officials from Dignity Memorial Hospital said they could not legally prohibit law enforcement from being in public areas.

That’s true, say legal experts: Waiting rooms and lobbies are considered public spaces in hospitals. But agents cannot move through hospitals without limits. Law enforcement officials are not allowed to search for people in exam rooms or other private spaces without a federal court warrant.

When agents bring in someone who is in their custody and needs medical care, the application of the law can be more murky.

According to Richardson at the hospital association, how far an agent can go into treatment areas with a detained patient may be decided on a case by case basis. In cases where a detained patient is struggling or resisting, that patient may need guarding, she explained.

And if law enforcement officers do go inside exam rooms, they may hear medical information while on guard. But that isn't necessarily a privacy violation, according to federal rules. The HIPPA Privacy Rule, the law that sets privacy standards for medical information, has a provision that allows for “incidental disclosures” of information as long as “reasonable safeguards” are applied.

“The hospital will, and the doctor will make reasonable attempts to protect the patient's privacy.” “What is reasonable is going to depend, again, on what's wrong with the patient, how the patient is behaving, the nature of the circumstances,” Richardson said.

HIPAA protects the disclosure of medical records, which include names, addresses and social security numbers along with health conditions. State law also requires health facilities to protect this information. According to guidance from the attorney general’s office, health facilities should consider a patient’s immigration status confidential.

At the same time, some disclosures are required if law enforcement can prove lawful custody or show an appropriate warrant. A federal court warrant signed by a judge grants law enforcement immediate access to information or to search a particular area, while an ICE administrative warrant does not require immediate compliance.

Health workers in 'precarious' situations 

Health facilities generally direct frontline workers not to engage with immigration agents, but rather to immediately contact security or management.

One particular incident at a Southern California surgery center stands out, in conversation with health workers.

On July 8, federal agents targeted three landscapers who had parked outside of the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center. They chased one of the men inside on foot, according to a felony criminal complaint filed against two health care workers in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

In videos of the incident posted online, a masked agent wearing a vest labeled “POLICE ICE” on the back holds a weeping man by the shoulder inside the center while several workers in scrubs stand by. At multiple points in the video workers ask the officer for identification; one worker says, “this is a private business.”

Two workers, Danielle Davila and Jose Ortega, tell the officer to leave. Davila moves between the officer and the man, saying “Get your hands off of him. You don’t even have a warrant.”

Ortega puts an arm between Davila and the officer and says “You have no proper identification.”

The officer says to both workers “You touched a federal agent.” Then Davila responds, “I’m not touching you.”

Davila and Ortega were later charged with two felony counts of assaulting a federal officer and conspiring to prevent a federal officer from performing their duties.

Last week the felony charges were dismissed and both Davila and Ortega pleaded not guilty to a subsequent misdemeanor assault charge. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the charges.

People stand on the stairs at an entrance of Dignity Health-Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale.

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Robyn Beck

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Davila’s defense attorney Oliver Cleary said his client believed she was doing the right thing by asking for credentials and a warrant.

“You can’t just come in where people are getting medical care and whisk them away,” Cleary said. “She didn’t know who these people were. They didn’t tell her who they were, and as far as she knew this was a patient of the clinic.”

Carlos Juárez, Ortega’s defense attorney, said arresting and charging health workers with crimes for asking to see a warrant and identification puts them in a “precarious” and “dangerous situation.”

“They did what they needed to do and what they had a right to do,” Juárez said. “What I hope is it doesn’t have a chilling effect on other health care workers.”

Workers say additional training can help

Around the state, health workers say they’d like to see management provide additional guidance on how to respond to such scenarios if they were to play out in their workplace. Some workers are providing training themselves.

Adriana Rugeles-Ortiz, a licensed vocational nurse at Kaiser Permanente Modesto Medical Center, has been leading “Know Your Rights” sessions at her hospital and in her community as part of her union, SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West. She said some of her coworkers have expressed anxiety over some of the situations they’ve seen play out in other hospitals.

“Because of my involvement with all the training that we have done to the workers and to the community, personally, I do feel prepared. I am not that confident that we have been able to reach the entire workforce within Kaiser to get them to the level of confidence to deal with it,” Rugeles-Ortiz said.

Dr. Douglas Yoshida, an emergency room physician at Stanford Health Tri-Valley in Alameda County, said additional guidance and training for workers at medical facilities could be of great value.

“I think as health care providers, we need to deliver good health care to these patients, just like any other patient, and we need to protect their rights,” Yoshida said. “I mean, personally, if someone comes in in ICE custody, within the limits of the law, I want to do everything I can to help [patients.]”

The hospital in Pleasanton that Yoshida works in is located near the county’s Santa Rita Jail; staff, he said, have been used to a law enforcement presence. But the recent incident at John Muir Medical Center, about 30 miles north, as well as the criminal charges filed against the southern California surgery center workers have set people on edge, Yoshida said.

“Normally, health care workers have no reason to fear law enforcement,” he added, “but we’re in uncharted territory.”

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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Laura Hertfeldz

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”