When I walk into the chaos of the emergency department (ED), I expect traumas, cardiac arrests, and acute strokes. What I don’t expect is the eerie sense that some patients walked in the door more afraid of being deported than of their own medical emergency. Recent data has shown an alarming increase in [federal] Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions and arrests under the Trump administration, driven by racial/ethnic profiling and $45 billion in funding courtesy of the reconciliation bill signed into law by President Trump in summer 2025, resulting in a nearly 40 percent increase in detainments.^1,2

Although news of raids in cities such as Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Charlotte, North Carolina, and elsewhere around the country is publicized, the injuries to patients are not always reported. Data regarding the surge in injuries related to ICE raids have been poorly tracked. From a strictly data-driven standpoint, there lies a dangerous gap in information. Currently there is no trackable national database showing a clear increase in ED visits for injuries sustained during ICE agent enforcement. Some regional reporting hints at increases in trauma: A Chicago alderwoman said agents brought injured people to the hospital from a raid; one man “broke his leg running from the agents.”³ Another report from California described doctors seeing detained patients with injuries after raids and agents embedded in hospital rooms. Some reports stated that “hospital administrators are allowing federal immigration agents to interfere in medical decisions and block doctors from properly treating detainees who need emergency care.”⁴ But no robust epidemiologic study has yet quantified the rise in injuries and ED visits as a consequence of ICE actions.

Emergency physicians are aware of the risk . An article intended for ED staff warns that when ICE enforcement moves into once-protected “sensitive locations,” such as hospitals, the consequences include disruptions of care, increased stress for staff and patients, and secondary injuries from delayed care.⁵ So while we can’t definitively say that ED visits for ICE enforcement-related injuries increased by a certain percentage, we can say the risk is real, and the institutional impact is apparent.

Here’s where the data get clearer, and scarier for us as emergency physicians. Research consistently shows that enforcement activity by ICE and the surrounding deportation rhetoric creates a chilling effect on health-seeking behavior in immigrant populations. For example, a study found that after raids or legislation targeting immigrants, visits to county public-health clinics dropped about 25 percent among Latino adults.⁶ A recent article reported that many patients have said that they’ve “hesitated or waited too long to come in for health care” because of fear of ICE [agents] in hospitals.⁷ In New York, a federally qualified health-center doctor said that one shelter stopped receiving patients altogether because “almost no one was showing up for care” after rumors that ICE was operating nearby.⁸ In another story, a woman reportedly avoided prenatal care because she feared her partner’s deportation. Her baby suffered complications as a result.⁹ So, no, we may not have a neat ICD-10 code for this yet, but we have real stories of delay, avoidance, and the medical sequelae that follows. It likely leads to more advanced presentations, more preventable complications, more cost, and worse outcomes.