Experts have long known that immigration enforcement efforts have an effect on the health of individuals as well as the larger community, but recent immigration policies have again brought these health challenges into sharper focus.
“From a public health perspective, existing research shows that there is no healthy way to do immigration enforcement,” said Maria-Elena Young, an immigrant health scholar at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, who has studied how such policies are linked to healthcare access and health outcomes.
Research dating back to the mid-1990s showed immigration enforcement policies can lead to healthcare avoidance, poor maternal and infant health due to delayed or spotty care, institutional distrust prompting avoidance of emergency services and mental health challenges.
The current enforcement landscape
The Trump administration has defended its deportation efforts as matters of national security, enforcing the rule of law and good fiscal policy. ICE officials have publicized their success in capturing “criminal illegal aliens convicted of horrible crimes,” in recent news releases on July 4 and in a statement after the recent World Cup matches. The administration holds that its efforts are making the country safer, claiming 70% of ICE arrests are “illegal aliens,” who have been charged or convicted of a crime. So far, 3 million people have been deported under the administration’s enforcement policies.
Recent academic analyses show that these escalating efforts have had an impact on public health as detailed in this April 2026 article by policy experts at Georgetown University.
Impact on healthcare
While the vigor of enforcement may ebb and flow, depending on who is setting policy, Young said that long-established barriers to healthcare access exist for immigrants of all types, from undocumented immigrants to those awaiting citizenship and even US citizens who are in mixed-status families or part of a larger immigrant community.
“Barriers for immigrants are baked into our healthcare system in the United States,” she said. “For decades, many groups of non-citizens have been ineligible for federally funded public benefit programs like Medicaid and SNAP, which are essential for good health. Under federal law, states can opt to use their own funding to extend access to these vital health care programs. But what that means is…we have very different healthcare landscapes across the country.”
The National Immigration Law Center keeps comprehensive information on what healthcare services each state provides for immigrants.
What distinguishes the current landscape, according to Young, is that “at this moment, all groups, regardless of their age, their immigration status, their immigration community contexts, all of these groups are potentially at risk” of enforcement actions and experiencing hurdles to accessing care. “Families, individuals now have to contend with fear of potential immigration enforcement actions as they also seek and try to obtain needed medical care,” she said.
Shortly after inauguration in January 2025, President Trump rescinded the “sensitive areas” designation. Now immigration agents are permitted to enter healthcare facilities, including clinics and hospital emergency rooms, to question and detain people.
The National Immigration Law Center noted that this policy has “a chilling effect on immigrant communities now afraid to access medical care, education, childcare, and places of worship for fear that they or a loved one will be ripped away from the community. Protected areas are also unique in that overall public health and safety suffer if any particular community is precluded or afraid to access them. Public health suffers on a large scale, for example, when any one community becomes unable or afraid to access vaccination sites or clinics to receive care for contagious diseases.”
The 2025 Latino Immigrant National Attitude Study, conducted by the Brookings Institute, surveyed 1,000 Latino immigrants, nearly half of whom were naturalized citizens, and found that 13% avoided seeking healthcare regardless of citizenship status.
Another policy change that has alarmed public health experts is the Trump administration’s reinterpretation of a 1996 law to reclassify several community-based health programs, including health centers and behavioral health initiatives, as “federal public benefits,” making millions of immigrants ineligible for basic health services.
“In essence, by recategorizing this, reinterpreting federal law, and violating the law by not following the administrative procedures act, we believe they’re denying people services for which they’re legally eligible and which will impact their health,” said Dr. George Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, which, along with dozens of other organizations and policymakers, filed an amici curiae brief in federal court in March in opposition to this change.
“Denying access to essential healthcare is morally unjust, medically inappropriate and puts all communities at risk by shifting and exacerbating existing healthcare problems with cost, quality, and access to the broader population,” Benjamin said when the brief was filed. “It forces people to receive care later in the course of their disease and creates barriers to receiving preventive health services when it can do the most good.”
The far-reaching effects
Through her research, Young has documented what is termed the “spillover effect,” in which US citizens are affected by heightened immigration enforcement, which takes a psychological toll as well as possibly deterring them from seeking needed care even as citizens.
“In my…research we see that the US-born individuals, including white US-born individuals … if they live in states that have extensive agreements for local law enforcement to work with immigration authorities, they actually report worse health. And so the potential health harms are far-reaching,” she said.
People who are not legally at risk of deportation, but who see immigration agents in their neighborhoods or know a neighbor or family member who was deported, are at increased risk for psychological distress and mental health challenges.
Cecilia Menjivar, the Dorothy L. Meier chair in Social Equities and a professor of Sociology at UCLA, also has studied this phenomenon and said “that spillover effect that extends even to US citizens who live in mixed status families – they cannot be deported, but when their parents, their siblings, their spouses are deported, they are affected as well.”
If people are afraid or unable to access necessary healthcare, the repercussions may even extend far beyond those individuals or their families.
“What happens when they don’t receive those services? Obviously they don’t get vaccinated,” Benjamin said. “If you have someone who is pregnant, the child – and when they’re born here they are a citizen – if that child doesn’t get prenatal care they may end up ill, presuming they survive and don’t become a statistic of infant mortality.
“They may develop disabilities; they may become a preterm birth. And, by the way, we end up paying for that because they may end up in the ICU, the NICU, at an enormous cost to both them and society. [These policies] create enormous health implications for them and for us and for society,” he said.
Legal system is last resort
Benjamin is placing his trust in the legal system to stop the current immigration enforcement policies that he sees as eroding public health.
“The law works,” he said. “That’s one of the few things right now that’s working. There have been past administrations where you could move them by showing the inhumanity of what their policies might do. And if that didn’t work, the economic disadvantage of what they might do. One or two of those or both of those have often been able to help people make better policy decisions.”
Benjamin added that using inhumanity and economic arguments have not worked with this administration, leaving the legal argument as the last resort. “We think that it’s important for people to understand the implications are not just to other people. This is everybody,” he said.