Doctors in Minnesota decry fear and chaos amid Trump administration's immigration crackdown

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.

But a year ago, the Trump administration announced that federal immigration agencies could now make arrests in those facilities, ending a policy that had been in effect since 2011.

“I have been a practicing physician for more than 19 years here in Minnesota, and I have never seen this level of chaos and fear,” including at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, Dwivedi said.

The crackdown, which began late last year, surged to unprecedented levels in January when the Department of Homeland Security said it would send 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area in what it called the largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.

More than 3,000 people in the country illegally had been arrested during what it dubbed Operation Metro Surge, the government said in a Monday court filing.

“Our patients are missing,” with pregnant women missing out on key prenatal care, said Dr. Erin Stevens, legislative chair for the Minnesota section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Requests for home births have also increased significantly, “even among patients who have never previously considered this or for whom, it is not a safe option,” Stevens said.

The surge in the deeply liberal Twin Cities has set off clashes between activists and immigration officers, pitted city and state officials against the federal government, and left a mother of three dead, shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in what federal officials said was an act of self-defense but that local officials described as reckless and unnecessary.

The Trump administration and Minnesota officials have traded blame for the heightened tensions.

The latest flare-up came Sunday, when protesters disrupted a service at a St. Paul church because one of its pastors leads the local ICE field office. Some walked right up to the pulpit at the Cities Church, with others loudly chanting “ICE out.”

The U.S. Department of Justice said it has opened a civil rights investigation into the church protest.