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A bill concept being floated for the short session of the Oregon Legislature would restrict the movements of immigration agents within hospitals and shape how hospitals interact with them.
The proposal, backed by a coalition that includes the powerful Oregon Nurses Association, is an attempt to place legal limits on the activity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to medical facilities, which have increasingly become the setting of conflict.
As President Donald Trump’s immigration raids extend to Oregon, reports have increased of ICE and other federal officers bringing twitchy, unwelcome and aggressive miens to the health care sphere.
Examples abound. Feds threatening to shoot an ambulance worker. Feds “roaming” a hospital. Feds shooting two immigrants outside a hospital.
Any reform effort will face a stark limitation. “State law can not regulate federal agents,” says the ONA’s director of government relations, Paige Spence. “So what the bill would regulate is hospitals.”
But backers say the proposal, though it could not curtail all of the incidents that have made headlines, would still have meaningful teeth. “Providers,” Spence tells WW, “can’t have patient decisions being dictated or overruled by a man with a gun.”
Federal immigration agents have had “essentially unregulated access to healthcare settings,” says Sen. Wlnsvey Campos (D-Aloha), who is set to sponsor a bill. “We’ve heard the stories of Oregonians who have become increasingly afraid to seek care. We’ve also heard from healthcare workers, nurses, frontline staff, clinicians, who have been placed in impossible positions.”
No final text of the “Health Care Without Fear Act” has been made public, but as it gets finalized, Campos and other advocates say a bill will be modeled on a similar California law, SB81, that passed last year.
They say the Oregon proposal will have four basic provisions.
The first is to mandate that applicable health care facilities designate public and private patient care areas—from which, they say federal law enforcement would be restricted without a warrant.
The second is to treat immigration status and birth place as protected health information. The third would protect health care workers from retaliation from their employer for providing certain educational materials or information to patients. This comes after the ONA says Legacy put one of its members on leave for distributing know-your-rights information. (Legacy says it does not comment on personnel matters.)
The fourth provision would mandate hospitals establish consistent policies guiding how administration interfaces with federal immigration agents—the idea being a supervisor, rather than nurses and other frontline staff, should deal with federal agents who are seeking, say, information about a patient.
The enforcer of this law would be the Oregon Health Authority, which would be empowered to suspend or revoke licenses for institutions that violate it.
The bill concept grows out of well documented frustration from nurses over what they describe as an untenable scenario playing out in recent months at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, where federal agents have at times brought detainees and allegedly behaved in unprofessional manner that undermined patient care.
In public, and in a cease-and-desist letter to the ONA, Legacy has rejected many of the union’s assertions, and argued all the fuss has, perversely, discouraged patients from seeking care.
Hospitals have clearly been put in a unenviable situation. A video meeting from December that WW reviewed shows a Legacy leader telling staff that the institution sought to ”keep Legacy off the radar of the current administration where possible,” so as to preserve funding. (The Portland Mercury first reported on those comments).
The bill concept also won’t address some of the most high-profile cases of federal agents conducting missions on or near hospital grounds, as in the shooting of two Venezuelan nationals earlier this month that alarmed many Portlanders. Recently, as first reported by Noticias Noroeste and confirmed by the U.S. Department Homeland Security, federal agents detained a Venezuelan couple and their daughter outside a Portland hospital. That incident wouldn’t be prevented by the new strictures, either.
And until the text is fixed, it remains unclear how other stakeholders, like the Hospital Association of Oregon, regard the bill concept.
Still, Campos says she has backing from a swath of fellow Democrats in the legislature, and they have many health care professionals at their back.
Dr. Eva Galvez got involved in an organizing effort back in the spring. She wrote a resolution for the Oregon Academy of Family Physicians that would seek to make it easier for the organization to advocate on behalf of immigrant patients. She supported the development of this bill too.
She tells WW she’d felt this past spring that she was spinning her wheels and was seeking ways to make a difference. She’d hear from patients not wanting to come to the clinic or go get a mammogram, or see a gynecologist for that ovarian mass “because, they are telling me, ’I am worried that ICE is going to take me.’ And I remember thinking, ‘I want to be able to reassure my patients. But I really can’t.’”
