Speaking in front of 26 Federal Plaza — a federal building housing ICE, the FBI and an immigration court — about a dozen clinicians joined immigrant rights advocates in denouncing the conditions in which noncitizens have been kept across the country.
"The government is taking the authority and responsibility to detain people. They have an absolute responsibility to care for them," Steve Auerbach, a retired epidemiologist and pediatrician, said at the rally.
Auerbach said he and a group of other doctors were recently denied access to the 10th floor, where officers with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are detaining undocumented people in squalid conditions and denying them medical care.
"We went up to the front door, politely, in our white coats. I showed my license, and we presented it to the front desk," Auerbach said. "DHS refused to come out to us."
Last week, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan issued a temporary restraining order requiring ICE to improve living conditions inside the impromptu jail on the building's 10th floor, including by providing medical care to detainees and ensuring they receive their medications.
Two days after the order, five letters containing unknown white powder in ICE's mail room prompted an evacuation of the building. Detainees were removed from the 10th floor's holding space, but immigrant rights advocates are concerned that the facility will be used again to hold detainees while they attend court hearings.
At the rally on Monday, the doctors said that officers with ICE, an agency under the purview of DHS, should be prevented from entering healthcare facilities.
On Jan. 20, acting DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman issued a memorandum that rescinded a Biden administration-era "protected areas" policy, eliminating formal protections for sensitive locations like hospitals, clinics, schools and places of worship.
ICE officers may enter public areas of medical facilities such as lobbies and waiting areas without a warrant. But to access nonpublic areas like treatment and exam rooms, an ICE agent must have either a judicial warrant signed by a federal judge or consent from the facility.
The doctors on Monday called on the city's hospitals to push back against any attempt by ICE officers to gain entry.
"ICE has no role inside our healthcare facilities," Auerbach said. "U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens all deserve privacy."
They also called for the strengthening of sanctuary policies. The doctors urged city lawmakers to pass the New York City Trust Act, which would create a right for individual citizens to file civil suits seeking damages when city agencies, such as the New York Police Department, collaborate with immigration authorities.
The doctors said Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature should convene a special session to also pass the New York For All Act, a legislation that would limit collaboration between state and local agencies and ICE.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander — who was arrested in June while complaining to ICE officers about arrests of noncitizens in immigration court — also spoke at the rally, thanking volunteer doctors and legal aid nonprofits that have helped immigrants amid the Trump administration's aggressive deportation policies.
"Human beings are being kept in this building, which is not designed as a facility for anyone to sleep in, and they are being denied even basic medical care," he said.
Sonni Mun, a retired internal medicine physician who volunteers as an immigration court observer at 26 Federal Plaza, said she witnessed a medical emergency inside the building's lobby in late June and called the response "appalling."
Mun said she saw a woman in a wheelchair who appeared to have fainted. After Mun produced a copy of her medical license, she asked officers if they had called 911. She was told that they had, but that turned out to be a lie, she said, because responders never arrived. A nurse working for ICE later did arrive and told Mun to "go away" because she was no longer needed, the retired physician recalled.
"This is how they treat somebody who's having a medical emergency in the lobby. This is how they treat other colleagues," Mun said. "How do you think they're treating the immigrants that they've got caged up there?"
Chanelle Diaz, a primary care physician who has done medical evaluations of people in immigration detention since 2018, told Law360 on Monday that many of the deaths of people detained by ICE were due to chronic conditions not being managed properly while in detention.
"It actually sounds like what is happening here and in some of these kind of pop-up detention facilities is actually worse than what I witnessed in immigration jails and prisons," Diaz said.
At least on paper, Diaz said, ICE's full-blown detention centers are forced to adhere to standards of care that might be nonexistent in holding facilities such as the one in Lower Manhattan.
"Places like this don't have a designated nurse or doctor, they don't have the same access to evaluation that some people may actually have in immigration, jails and prisons," said Diaz, who provided medical expert review of death records of people who died in ICE custody as part of a report published last year by Physicians for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union.
In this fiscal year, at least 13 people have died in ICE custody across the country, according to data published by the agency. Doctors worry there could be many more deaths if the Trump administration follows through on its plans to expand the daily detention capacity to 100,000 noncitizens on any given day.
Sophie Dalsimer, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights organization focused on health, disability and environmental justice, told Law360 on Monday that some people who have been arrested by ICE at court hearings have developed serious health conditions despite having been overall healthy. Those with existing conditions have been denied care, she said.
"People who have ongoing health needs or chronic health conditions are arrested and detained and abruptly severed from the care and treatment that they were receiving in the community, with devastating effects," Dalsimer said.
One of those detainees includes a person who underwent an open-heart surgery weeks prior to being arrested — and later felt "extremely ill" while being held at 26 Federal Plaza, according to Dalsimer.
In another instance, a man who had suffered a brain injury following a workplace accident and was receiving ongoing care and pain and nerve damage treatment prior to his arrest had been denied access to critical medication. The man became nearly unresponsive and was taken to a hospital before being brought back to the facility, where a nurse eventually contacted the detainee's family to ask to bring his medication, Dalsimer said.
"In general, the attitude that we hear from a lot of the healthcare providers that are working for ICE or at the detention facilities is one of distrust towards the people that they are supposed to be caring for," she said. "They tend to be immediately suspicious of the people that are in their custody, to assume that people are exaggerating their symptoms, to assume that people are withholding information."
--Editing by Melissa Treolo.
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