Doctors in Minnesota Decry Fear And Chaos Amid Trump Administration's Immigration Crackdown

Patients are frightened, suffering and failing to show up for appointments, physicians say.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — There was the pregnant woman who missed her medical checkup, afraid to visit a clinic during the Trump administration’s sweeping Minnesota immigration crackdown. A nurse found her at home, already in labor and just about to give birth.

There was the patient with kidney cancer who vanished without his medicine in immigration detention facilities. It took legal intervention for his medicine to be sent to him, though doctors are unsure if he’s been able to take it.

There was the diabetic afraid to pick up insulin, the patient with a treatable wound that festered and required a trip to the intensive care unit, and the hospital staffers — from Latin America, Somalia, Myanmar and elsewhere — too scared to come to work.

“Our places of healing are under siege,” Dr. Roli Dwivedi, past president of the Minnesota Academy of Family Physicians, said Tuesday at a state Capitol news conference in St. Paul, where doctor after doctor told of patients suffering amid the clampdown.

For years, hospitals, schools and churches had been off-limits for immigration enforcement.