With our free press under threat and federal funding for public media gone, your support matters more than ever. Help keep the LAist newsroom strong, become a monthly member or increase your support today.
At a Boyle Heights hospital, ICE agents call the shots, doctors say

Doctors at Adventist Health White Memorial hospital in Boyle Heights told LAist that hospital administrators are allowing federal immigration agents to interfere in medical decisions and block doctors from properly treating detainees who need emergency care.
Administrators at White Memorial have told doctors not to call a detained patient’s family members, even to find out what type of medication they’re on or what conditions they have, doctors told LAist. Hospital leaders also have told doctors to allow immigration agents to remain by a detained patient’s side, even during consultations, inhibiting frank discussions between doctors and their patients and potentially violating patient privacy laws. Doctors say this is not typical protocol for any patients, including those brought in by local police or sheriff’s deputies.
These doctors are equally concerned about their inability to ensure follow-up care for patients released to the ICE processing facility known as B-18 in downtown L.A., where critics say some detainees have been held for days on end with no proper beds or medical care.
Why this matters
White Memorial is part of a network of private, nonprofit hospitals affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with $7 billion in annual revenue. The hospital has been operating for more than 110 years. Its calling is to “help improve the lives of our friends and neighbors in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights,” according to its website.
Five physicians at White Memorial shared the details with LAist about ICE’s presence at the hospital and hospital administrators’ response on the condition that they not be named for fear of retaliation from their employer or from immigration authorities. LAist reviewed internal emails supporting their claims.
“We have an ethical and moral duty to provide excellent medical care and to serve the patient’s interest,” one doctor at White Memorial told LAist. But the doctor said the frequent presence of masked, armed immigration agents in the hospital makes it “very difficult to do that.”
The physicians told LAist they believe the directives from their bosses conflict with the responsibilities all doctors have to their patients and with guidance from the California attorney general.
White Memorial did not respond to a request for an interview from LAist or to our emailed list of questions.
In a statement, a White Memorial spokesperson said the hospital’s staff “are passionately committed to providing the highest standard of medical care to all who come through our doors, regardless of their circumstances” and that the hospital has “protocols in place that are designed to help support the lawful respect of patient rights.”
“We are doing everything in our power to provide safe and compassionate care to our community during this time of unrest,” the statement reads. It also urged people not to "delay the medical care you need.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, did not respond to specific questions from LAist or agree to an interview.
In a statement, she wrote that “ICE is not denying any illegal alien access to proper medical care or medications.” McLaughlin said it was “longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody.”
She added that she hoped LAist “would consider NOT writing this garbage” in the wake of the recent shooting outside an ICE detention center in Texas, where one detainee was killed and two injured.
“These types of smears are contributing to our officers facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them,” she wrote.
An analysis of federal court filings for assault on a federal officer by Colorado Public Radio shows a sharp increase in charges in recent months. The data is far short of the scale suggested by officials.
The bigger picture
A version of the conflicts described at White Memorial is happening across the state and the country as hospitals are forced to contend with fallout from the Trump administration’s mass deportation program. Caught in the middle are doctors and other medical professionals who have a legal duty to provide medical care to patients and ethical concerns about policies they feel affect the traditional standards of care.
The five doctors who spoke with LAist say the conflicts are especially acute at White Memorial, a hospital whose patient and surrounding population is mostly Latino and where several doctors told LAist they’re seeing two to three detained patients per shift.
The situation also raises questions about medical privacy at a time when the federal government is seeking access to sensitive personal information, including medical information from both immigrants and U.S.-born citizens.
Lorenzo Antonio González is a physician who volunteers with Unión del Barrio, which patrols Boyle Heights and other neighborhoods to warn people about ICE raids. He does not work at White Memorial but is aware of the doctors’ concerns. He said he fears ICE’s frequent presence at the hospital will further the chilling effect already causing many Boyle Heights neighbors — where more than 80% of households speak Spanish and a quarter of residents are noncitizens — to forgo medical care and avoid leaving their homes. González called White Memorial’s alleged behavior “an erosion of trust within this pillar of a community.”

How we got here
As immigration raids ramped up in Los Angeles this year, some detainees have needed urgent medical care, either because they were injured while being detained, had a pre-existing illness, or because they became ill while being held at the downtown immigration facility.
Some of these incidents became headlines. In July, a Salvadoran woman was brought to Glendale Memorial Hospital with injuries suffered during a raid. In that case, camera crews descended on the hospital as activists protested the presence of ICE agents in the public lobby.
Meanwhile, White Memorial stayed out of the news. In June, a hospital leader sent an email to colleagues, flagging several incidents involving immigration detainees, including one in which agents remained in the room with a detained patient during the patient’s entire stay at the hospital. The email also noted that agents told doctors they could not call the patient’s family members when the patient couldn’t remember her medications, according to the email and doctors who spoke with LAist.
Doctors at White Memorial and other hospitals told LAist it’s not typical for law enforcement officers to remain in the room during patient care, even with criminal detainees, unless there’s a serious security risk. People in ICE custody are civil, not criminal detainees. Doctors also told LAist it’s common practice to call family members, with a patient’s permission, to inquire about their medical history and current medications.
So the doctors at White Memorial pressed hospital administrators for a clear policy and legal guidance on how to balance ICE agent demands with the hospital’s responsibilities for patient care.
The answer that came back from hospital administrators: defer to the agents.
Hospital leaders told doctors — both verbally, doctors say, and in writing in several emails reviewed by LAist — that immigration agents are allowed to be present at all times, even during discussions about a patient’s sensitive medical information. Doctors also were told they could not call a detained patient’s family member without an agent’s permission. In one email to subordinates, a hospital leader told White Memorial staff that doing so could be a “security risk.”
“That’s like encouraging medical negligence,” one White Memorial doctor told LAist in response to this guidance.
At least one doctor told LAist they are defying hospital leaders’ guidance, deferring instead to their medical duty to the patient and to follow medical privacy laws.
“There’s no way you can get me to not call a patient’s family if they’re hurt and need support,” the doctor said.
The bigger picture
The concerns about White Memorial come at a time when the care of people in ICE custody is under scrutiny. In August, a man was severely injured while being detained at a car wash in Carson. Agents brought him to Harbor-UCLA medical center for treatment and remained by his bed, to which the man was cuffed, for over a month, according to a recent court ruling. He was never charged with violating any immigration laws, and in October, a federal judge ordered the agents monitoring him to leave the man’s hospital room and remove restrictions on the man’s “ability to make telephone calls to family and friends and to confer confidentially with counsel outside the presence of ICE agents.”

Concerns about the medical care of detainees also extends to formal ICE detention centers. In September, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a Westminster man who was being held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, became the 17th person to die in ICE custody this year. Last year, 12 people died in ICE custody, according to agency statistics.
Ayala-Uribe, 39, was a former DACA recipient who supporters say had lived in the country since he was 4 years old. He was picked up in an ICE raid in Fountain Valley in August and sent to Adelanto. From there, a medical provider at the detention facility sent Ayala-Uribe to a nearby hospital, where he was evaluated for an abscess, scheduled for surgery and sent back to the facility. He died in custody the following day.
Earlier this year, as immigration raids ramped up, the advocacy group Disability Rights California interviewed 18 people detained at the Adelanto ICE facility. In a subsequent report, the group concluded that "due to the surging numbers of people at Adelanto, conditions appear to have quickly deteriorated.” The report claimed detainees faced "inadequate access to medical treatment, such as life-saving medication and wound care and exposure to widespread respiratory illnesses."
In response to LAist’s emailed questions about medical care for ICE detainees, McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, said detainees received “medical, dental and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care. This is the best healthcare … many aliens have received in their entire lives," she wrote.
McLaughlin did not respond to LAist’s follow-up email asking her to specifically respond to questions about hospital care for detainees outside of detention centers or to questions about the availability of health care at the B-18 processing center, which unlike the Adelanto facility, is not an official detention center.
In a recent, ongoing lawsuit over the L.A. immigration raids, the ACLU and other groups called out alleged unsanitary conditions and a lack of medical care at B-18.
“Individuals with conditions that require consistent medications and treatment are not given any medical attention, even when that information is brought to the attention of the officers on duty,” reads the initial complaint, filed in July.
One doctor at White Memorial told LAist she had called ICE supervisors at the holding center on several occasions to inquire about follow-up care for patients and was told there were no doctors at the facility and there was no way to obtain medication.
What this all means for detainees — and doctors
Other groups have tried to bring attention to the problems associated with immigration agents in hospital settings. The Committee of Interns and Residents, which is is part of the Service Employees International Union, publicly denounced the presence of ICE agents at University of California hospitals in July, saying it creates “an unsafe environment that … directly contradicts our mission to provide safe, effective and quality healthcare to every member of our community.”
Mahima Iyengar, a doctor at L.A. General hospital and secretary-treasurer of the committee, told LAist that having a law enforcement officer present during doctor-patient conversations can compromise care.
“There's that level of trust that people have with their doctor that they don't necessarily have when somebody else is listening,” Iyengar told LAist. “Your doctor is then not getting as much information as they need, and that information … very well could be what helps them come up with a diagnosis or what helps them decide what treatment [the patient] is going to be on.”
Iyengar said doctors also are unlikely to feel comfortable asking a patient important non-medical questions when an ICE agent is present.
“A lot of what determines our patients' health are all of these social determinants, like where they're living, how they're getting to the hospital, if they have money, if they have kids that need childcare right now while they're hospitalized,” she said. “All of those questions are important questions to ask that I would not personally feel comfortable asking if an officer was standing right there.”
McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, did not respond to LAist’s specific questions about whether the agency recognizes detained patients’ privacy rights at hospitals.
What do legal experts say?
Last December, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued “guidance and model policies” for health care facilities in responding to the anticipated increase in immigration enforcement. The guidance is not mandatory for private hospitals, like White Memorial, but all health care facilities were “encouraged to adopt” model policies. Doctors who spoke with LAist said they had read the guidance and felt beholden to it.
The document states that:
- State and federal medical privacy laws apply to all patients “regardless of immigration status.”
- Health care facility staff “should identify circumstances in which granting immigration enforcement officers access to patients may interfere with physicians’ duty to provide competent medical care, to safeguard patient confidences and privacy, and to otherwise prioritize their obligations to their patients”; and
- Facilities “should educate patients about their privacy rights and reassure them that their healthcare information is protected by federal and state laws.”
A spokesperson for Bonta told LAist the attorney general could not comment on whether the office had received complaints about ICE privacy breaches in health care settings because they are confidential.
“We continue to monitor compliance with all state and federal laws,” the spokesperson said in an email.
LAist also asked two health care legal experts about White Memorial’s direction to staff to allow ICE agents to be present during patient exams and bar calls to detained patients’ family members. Both said the guidance could violate medical privacy laws and ethical standards.
“From a patient safety perspective, it certainly raises red flags,” said Paul Schmeltzer, an L.A.-based health care and data privacy lawyer, referring especially to the prohibition on calling a detained patient’s family member. Schmeltzer also said letting an ICE agent remain next to a patient throughout their hospital stay without the patient’s consent is likely illegal. Patient privacy is protected under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, and California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act. Both generally prohibit doctors and hospitals from disclosing a patient’s medical information without their permission or a search warrant or other court order.
Schmeltzer said he saw “no permissible situation” under these laws for “disclosing” a detained patient’s hospital treatment to an ICE agent.
“The fact that an ICE agent is present in the room while this patient is receiving treatment, that's a disclosure,” he said.
Deven McGraw, chief regulatory and privacy officer for the company Citizen Health, a patient data platform, agreed.
“ You're basically saying, ‘Yeah, patient, you don't have a choice but to disclose your medical information to this law enforcement official,'” she said.
McGraw was in charge of enforcing HIPAA at the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights from 2015 to 2017. She said there are personal and public health reasons for shielding a patient’s medical information from law enforcement. For example, a patient might hide that they have a communicable disease out of fear they’ll be targeted or isolated.
“ We're supposed to treat people,” McGraw said. “The failure to treat them has potential consequences for their own health, plus the health of others.”
Schmeltzer and McGraw both said the administration at White Memorial might be making a calculated decision when weighing the hospital’s potential liability for violating the privacy rights of immigration detainees versus angering the Trump administration. Only the federal government and state attorneys general can prosecute a hospital for violating HIPAA, Schmeltzer and McGraw noted.
Some of the behavior described by doctors could be prohibited under a new state law, enacted in September as an “urgency” measure. The law requires health care facilities to ban immigration agents from entering non-public areas without a valid warrant and to advise staff on how to respond to agents’ requests for entry.
Even before the law, groups like the Committee of Interns and Residents had begun to train colleagues on the privacy rights of detained patients and how to handle ICE agents. Iyengar said doctors at L.A. General, for example, distribute “Know Your Rights” cards to immigrant patients and hospital employees are instructed to immediately call hospital directors if immigration agents appear.
“ Even just if there is an ICE officer in the hospital, that will put people off from visiting a loved one, or if word gets out, the community finds out, and they don't want come to that hospital,” she said. “So, it's just an unsafe environment to have an ICE officer in a hospital, especially [a hospital] that's serving mostly immigrants.”
LAist’s Ted Rohrlich also contributed to this story.
At LAist, we believe in journalism without censorship and the right of a free press to speak truth to those in power. Our hard-hitting watchdog reporting on local government, climate, and the ongoing housing and homelessness crisis is trustworthy, independent and freely accessible to everyone thanks to the support of readers like you.
But the game has changed: Congress voted to eliminate funding for public media across the country. Here at LAist that means a loss of $1.7 million in our budget every year. We want to assure you that despite growing threats to free press and free speech, LAist will remain a voice you know and trust. Speaking frankly, the amount of reader support we receive will help determine how strong of a newsroom we are going forward to cover the important news in our community.
We’re asking you to stand up for independent reporting that will not be silenced. With more individuals like you supporting this public service, we can continue to provide essential coverage for Southern Californians that you can’t find anywhere else. Become a monthly member today to help sustain this mission.
Thank you for your generous support and belief in the value of independent news.

-
Distrito Catorce’s Guillermo Piñon says the team no longer reflects his community. A new mural will honor local leaders instead.
-
The program is for customers in communities that may not be able to afford turf removal or water-saving upgrades.
-
More than half of sales through September have been to corporate developers. Grassroots community efforts continue to work to combat the trend.
-
The bill would increase penalties for metal recyclers who possess or purchase metal used in public infrastructure.
-
The new ordinance applies to certain grocers operating in the city and has led to some self-checkout lanes to shutter.
-
Children asked to waive right to see a judge in exchange for $2,500