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A bill concept being floated for the short session of the Oregon Legislature would seek to 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 manage the activity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at medical facilities, which have increasingly become the settings 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 would face a stark limitation. “State law cannot regulate federal agents,” says 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 health care settings,” says Sen. Wlnsvey Campos (D-Aloha), who is a chief sponsor of the bill. “We’ve heard the stories of Oregonians who have become increasingly afraid to seek care. We’ve also heard from health care workers, nurses, front-line staff, clinicians, who have been placed in impossible positions.”
No final text of the “Healthcare Without Fear Act”—Senate Bill 1570—has been made public. But as it gets finalized, Campos and other advocates say the bill would be modeled on a similar California law, Senate Bill 81, that passed last year.
They say the Oregon proposal would 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 birthplace as protected health information. The third would protect health care workers from retaliation by their employer for providing certain educational materials or information to patients. This comes after 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 that hospitals establish consistent policies guiding how administration interfaces with federal immigration agents—the idea being a supervisor, rather than nurses and other front-line 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 of institutions that violate it.
The bill concept grows out of well-documented frustration of nurses who describe what they say is an untenable scenario playing out in recent months at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, where federal agents have at times brought in detainees and allegedly behaved in an unprofessional manner that undermined patient care.
In public, and in a cease-and-desist letter to ONA, Legacy has rejected many of the union’s assertions and argued that 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 federal funding. (The Portland Mercury first reported on those comments).
The bill concept also wouldn’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, will regard the proposal. “We encourage lawmakers to focus on solutions that protect health care settings as places of healing,” said Hosptial association spokesperson Lisa Goodman in a written statement Friday. “We urge state and local officials to lend expertise and resources to hospitals that they can rely on for timely support and intervention.”
She added that Congress should take action to protect hospitals. “Hospitals remain committed to being safe and accessible to all, and we look forward to working with lawmakers on this important issue.”
Campos says she has backing from a swath of fellow Democrats in the Legislature, and many health care professionals support the idea as well.
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 earlier this year 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.’”
