More people are showing up to hospitals in ICE custody. A new report teaches staff how to respond

A legal nonprofit has released a report to help medical professionals care for the growing number of people who are showing up at hospitals in the custody of federal immigration agents.

Currently, there are about 65,000 people in ICE detention. Since January 2025, dozens of detainees have died, and many have complained about the lack of medical care in the detention centers that dot the country. As the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign continues, the number of detainees is expected to increase.

The report was created by the National Immigration Law Center, a nonprofit that works to defend the rights of immigrants with low incomes. Last week, the report’s authors gathered for a conversation facilitated by Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the U.S. immigration system.

Kocher said he held the panel to help people consider how mass deportation touches all kinds of institutions that people might not normally think about, from schools to churches to hospitals.

Geared toward doctors, nurses and hospital administrators, the report provides guidance on how to uphold patients’ rights and the institution’s ability to provide quality care.

In the report, the authors describe the experience of a man who sustained serious injuries during a workplace raid in early 2026. For more than a month, they said, immigration agents stayed in the patient’s hospital room — “day and night.”

The agents also controlled when the patient could speak to his lawyer, his family and his medical team. And although the patient had a broken leg, the officers “insisted on shackling him to his bed.”

Experiences like these raise urgent, practical questions the authors seek to answer for their colleagues, including:

• Can a nurse call the family of a patient in ICE or CBP custody?
• Can a doctor ask an immigration officer to leave the room during a physical examination?
• Can ICE or CBP force a hospital to discharge a patient who is not medically stable?

To this end, the report provides an overview of the laws and policies that pertain to patients in civil detention.

It also includes sample scripts to help doctors, nurses and other staff have legally valid, assertive conversations with federal agents when making requests, including asking for privacy to conduct examinations and the removal of handcuffs and other restraints. Through a summary of law enforcement agencies’ chain of command, medical professionals also learn how to escalate an issue if federal immigration agents refuse to comply.

Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the nonprofit and one of the report’s authors, stressed the importance of approaching the planning without being “unnecessarily combative.”

“The last thing we want with this report going out in the world is to de-incentivize ICE bringing people in for care,” she said.

Through an unnamed spokesperson, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, said that when federal agents take detainees to the hospital for medical care, "officers accompany them for their monitoring, safety of the staff, and the public."

Navigating a climate of fear

The report also notes that immigrants who have permission to work in the U.S. could be part of hospital staff. This includes people with a green card, visa, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who have also been subject to detention and even deportation. Authors warn that some people may assume that immigration officers are only interested in undocumented immigrants, but agency practice suggests otherwise.

“When there's an ICE officer who's walking around, oftentimes in plain clothes but armed, that has a chilling effect on everyone in that hospital,” Ibañez Whitlock said.

Theresa Cheng, a civil rights attorney and emergency physician at UCSF who also authored the report, described the dread she’s felt treating detained patients in the company of federal immigration agents — "right next to the pediatric emergency room waiting [area].” For Cheng and her colleagues, the fear of watching others get detained has become part of their working conditions.

As a result, the report also walks medical professionals through the importance of establishing clearly-defined private areas and protocols on how to proceed if an immigration agent arrives with a patient. The authors stress that hospitals should prepare everyone at their respective facilities to interact with immigration officers, including non-medical staff.