Commentary: Healthcare workers must stand up to ICE

Federal officials allege that on May 28th, 2026, a nurse at Trinity Health Ann Arbor helped a patient who had been detained and injured by ICE to escape custody. The state is now charging this nurse, Chloe Renee Freeman, with a federal misdemeanor.

As ICE, DHS, and other arms of state violence increase their systematic assault on immigrant communities, Freeman’s alleged actions exemplify what solidarity from the medical field can and should look like.

Under the current ICE siege, hospitals have become battlegrounds. Immigration agents often brutalize their targets, then bring them to emergency departments on their way to detention centers. This means that hospitals are often the first point at which people are disappeared into ICE custody. Once inside the emergency room, agents use pseudonyms to obscure the location of detained migrants; they deny patients visits with their community or lawyers; they physically restrain and surveil migrants; they harass and threaten staff.

These acts of violence are not only deeply immoral, they are also often illegal, violating migrant patients’ rights to care and to privacy.

Once transported to detention centers, patients are subjected to severe medical neglect that can be life-threatening. They not only lack access to medication, medical professionals, disability accommodations, and other forms of treatment, but also lack clean air, food, water, adequate clothing, and access to hygiene. Temperatures are dangerous high or low, and raw sewage and dangerous insects abound; staff are physically and verbally violent.

ICE detention is unsafe for anyone, much less patients who have been injured by ICE or who have any sort of illness, chronic condition, or disability. These concentration-camp-esque conditions have contributed to 52 deaths in ICE detention so far between January 2025 and June 2026.

Healthcare workers have a moral and professional duty to protect our patients. Complicity in ICE’s kidnappings is a violation of our mandate to do no harm. Healthcare workers who take action in solidarity with detained migrants, as Freeman is alleged to have done, exemplify courage and moral clarity.

These workers often act in defiance of a workplace culture which demands compliance with state violence and which capitulates to ICE, even when not legally required. But they are not alone. They are part of a rich history of healthcare workers declining to adhere to immoral laws, from doctors who participated in the Underground Railroad to underground abortion practitioners to healthcare workers providing gender affirming care despite criminalization. Today, resistance to ICE’s occupations of our hospitals and emergency rooms is everywhere.

When healthcare workers are willing to take action in solidarity, hospitals can also be spaces where kidnapped migrants are reappeared. For example, in LA and St. Paul, medical staff connected detained migrants in their care to legal resources. They kept these patients in their respective hospitals, instead of releasing them into ICE custody. Attorneys were able to fight for these patients’ release from ICE custody, and in both cases they were returned to their communities without entering a detention center.

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Organizing collectively can lead to even bigger wins, such as a May 2026 policy passed in L.A. to expand protections against ICE for hospital patients and staff.

As healthcare workers, we stand with Chloe Renee Freeman, and with all care providers who are penalized for protecting their patients. Freeman’s experiences shed light on the broader failures of our healthcare and legal systems, which surveil patients, criminalize their care, and punish providers for protecting their patients.

We call on the federal government to drop Freeman’s charges. We call on Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) not to punish Freeman or anyone else accused of non-cooperation with ICE. And more broadly, we call on our fellow healthcare workers to stand in solidarity with our patients by working towards systemic change within medicine in the following ways:

• End police and ICE presence in and near healthcare facilities
• End medically unnecessary information gathering, documentation, and surveillance
• Stop calling police or ICE on patients
• Stop providing or sanctioning substandard and/or coercive care in prisons, jails, detention centers, and other facilities
• Stop punishing healthcare workers for refusal to participate in systems of harm

We must resist turning our hospitals and clinics into prisons, our nurses into jailors.

If you are a healthcare worker, there are several ways to get involved supporting Chloe Freeman and fighting for immigrants. You can support Chloe by signing our letter of support here. Or get involved with your local ICE rapid response group – many immigrant rights organizations have connections with various local rapid response networks.

If you want to work specifically within the medical system, Beyond Do No Harm is a group of healthcare workers working to interrupt criminalization in southeastern Michigan; you can contact them here.