Minnesota Health Care Workers Unite for Better Patient Protection Amid ICE Crackdown by Matthew Cunningham-Cook

[justaprogressive]

The Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Metro Surge may be winding down in Minneapolis, but its officers are still active in the city and state. At Fairview Health Services, one of the two largest health care networks in the Twin Cities, hospital administrators are resisting efforts by labor union leaders to establish clear protocols for ensuring that patients are protected from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, and that caregivers are able to do their jobs and provide all patients with the care they need.

The fight in the Twin Cities over how hospitals respond to ICE comes as the country confronts a lawless agency that has grown so rapidly that it is now the world’s 13th-largest military force. The way hospitals choose to respond to ICE’s actions will determine whether or not the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S. continue to get medical care in the coming years.

On February 19, ICE agents arrested a Mexican immigrant named Adrian Sotelo Guzman in Minneapolis. Once he showed signs of extreme mental distress, they brought him to the emergency room at M Health Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, an inner suburb of Minneapolis and the closest hospital to the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE operations are based. While Sotelo Guzman was awaiting a hearing about the hospital’s recommendation that he be civilly committed, ICE agents returned on February 27, removed him from the ER, and sent him to Montgomery Processing Center in Texas, which has routinely failed to provide adequate mental health care to inmates. Fairview facilitated the transfer over the objection of its own health care providers. In recent legal filings, Sotelo Guzman’s lawyers allege that he was given powerful sedatives to facilitate his transfer, and his family has expressed concern about his well-being.

“Hospitals are treating ICE and Customs and Border Protection detainees the same as people who have been arrested.”

“For weeks ICE has been present in and around hospitals in the Twin Cities,” said Jill Lebrun, a registered nurse at M Health Fairview Riverside and treasurer of the Minnesota Nurses Association, at a February 20 press conference. The presence of federal immigration agents “undermines trust and interferes with people seeking care. Every patient deserves to feel safe in our hospitals regardless of their immigration status. When patients are detained, that means fear. People delay care, avoid hospitals, they suffer in silence. When trust erodes, patient safety erodes with it.”

https://prospect.org/2026/03/20/ice-minnesota-minneapolis-health-care-patient-protection-metro-surge/]

[Jilly_in_VA]

1. "Our job first and foremost is the care and safety of our patients--all our patients,"

That is what one of the medical residents said, and that is what I believe. I don't care who they are, that's the job of staff. And screw the administration, bot hospital and federal.

[Sweet Rosie Red]

3. Yes, I agree, Staff busts butt,

But they can only offer the care that the government, insurance companies and hospital administration will pay for. They have bills to pay too! Screw the oligarchs! Medicare, birth to death, for all!

[Sweet Rosie Red]

2. MHealth/Fairview provides terrible health care to the community

As an aging nurse with a very rare spine injury and complications, I have been through every medical system in the Minneapolis area. Of course, I didn’t have a diagnosis, so I started with Mayo. The only system providing worse care to Medicaid (MA)/Medicare patients in Minnesota is Mayo. Way back in the dark ages of 2017-ish, Mayo announced it was prioritizing the needs of private pay patients and instituted a stop light system to simplify care delivery. Private pay-Greenlight! Everything available right now! Employer based insurance-Yellow light! Care provided as openings available after insurance approval. Public pay insurance-Interns/Residents/Practicum staff available to provide care when bodies were needed to maintain educational certification. And of course, every attorney in the State is bought off so there is no recourse for malpractice. Mayo is the whale in the goldfish bowl in Minnesota; within a few years, every system in the State followed suit.

Fairview is an insurance company, as I understand it, and MHealth is run by the University of Minnesota. The care is simply 3rd world. Health Partners is the same. Go with Health Partners public insurance and try to get serious health care from a Health Partners affiliated Clinic, you better start putting burial money away.

The only work around I have found is insurance from one company and heath care from Allina. But now that Allina has been aquired by Sutter Health, I expect their quality of care will decline in the next few years.

Its all a very profitable race to the bottom. Enshittification on steroids! I often think of the old Irish blessing my grandfather taught us, “May you live as long as you want to; may you want to as long as you live.”