Recently, my hometown of Minneapolis has seen a brutal operation with a surge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, claiming the lives of two U.S. citizens and changing the lives of countless Minnesota residents. According to a New York Times analysis, over 230,000 people inside the country have been deported in the past year, offering a clear measure of the extensive efforts of these ICE surges that have occurred not only in Minnesota, but across the United States.
Large-scale ICE raids have substantial effects on the health of communities, and the further-reaching effects, including the general anti-immigration discourse, drastically impair health care accessibility and disparities.
The damage to community health begins the moment a raid happens, and the effects don’t stop there. A quasi-experimental study conducted by University of Michigan researchers in a Latino community in the Midwest found that community members who were surveyed after a local immigration raid reported significantly higher levels of immigration enforcement stress and worse self-rated health than those surveyed before it, even after accounting for factors like citizenship and age. The harm didn’t fall only on those arrested. It spread through the entire community, reflecting what researchers describe as strong evidence of ICE operations’ direct and indirect effects on Latino health.
The physiological consequences go even deeper. In the months that followed the Postville, Iowa immigration raid of 2008 — at the time the largest single-site federal raid in U.S. history — Latina mothers across the state of Iowa had a 24% greater risk of delivering low-birthweight infants, compared to the same period the year prior. Critically, this elevated risk was seen among both immigrant and U.S.-born Latina mothers, while white mothers in Iowa saw no such change. This is not a coincidence. Psychosocial stress, including the stress that raids cause, shifts hormone balances in pregnant women in ways that can restrict fetal growth and trigger premature birth. ICE operations, in other words, leave their mark on the next generation before they even enter the world.
The chilling effect on health care access is equally alarming and extends far beyond those directly targeted. Yale University and University of Pennsylvania researchers matched national survey data to ICE detention filings across states and found that increased deportation enforcement was linked to reduced use of health care services. This includes fewer routine checkups among Hispanic adults broadly, and even those with diabetes who depend on consistent medical management. Non-Hispanic adults showed no such change. This disparity lays bare the nature of enforcement’s health impact. Simply being an immigrant in an environment of aggressive enforcement is enough to keep people away from doctors’ offices, away from prenatal care and away from the preventive services that catch illness before it becomes catastrophic.
The structural barriers compounding these fears are not new, but enforcement makes them worse. Undocumented immigrants often work in jobs that provide no health coverage, have no access to Medicaid and live with the constant awareness that seeking help from any institution could expose them to scrutiny. Anti-immigration enforcement policy imbues health risk into the economic and social fabric of immigrants’ daily lives, restricting employment options, suppressing wages and cutting off access to legal protections that most Americans never have to think about. The result is a population managing chronic illness, pregnancy and mental health challenges while operating in a near-total absence of the safety net the rest of us take for granted.
Children bear a disproportionate share of this burden. In clinical settings serving immigrant communities, providers report sharp increases in anxiety, school absenteeism, psychosomatic symptoms and behavioral regression following immigration enforcement actions. These are children, many of them U.S. citizens, growing up in households where a knock at the door could mean the family is torn apart. The trauma that comes from that reality does not stay in the home. It follows kids into classrooms, into pediatric offices and into the rest of their lives.
These consequences are not a byproduct of immigration enforcement. They are a predictable and documented result of it. Health systems must advocate for protecting medical spaces from enforcement activity, expanding access through telemedicine and community health workers and treating immigration enforcement and the recent large-scale ICE operations as a public health crisis. Policymakers must reckon with the truth that every ICE surge and every act of indiscriminate enforcement carries a public health cost. A country that claims to value health cannot continue to wage war on the communities that need it most.
