Doctors at hospitals near the U.S.-Mexico border report that border patrol agents regularly treat undocumented immigrants like convicted criminals when taking them to receive medical care after apprehending them.
Dozens of asylum-seekers and migrants arrive at hospitals near the border every day in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, often dehydrated and suffering from other complications from their trek across the desert from their home countries.
“Doctors, who have a moral and ethical obligation and duty to care for patients, are actively being prevented from carrying out the practice of medicine as they’ve been trained to practice it.”
—Kathryn Hampton, Physicians for Human RightsA new report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) revealed Monday that although most of these migrants have broken no laws other than the misdemeanor of crossing the border without going through a designated entry point, the agents frequently shackle them to beds, insist on standing guard in their rooms, and interfere with their care in a number of ways.
“Doctors, who have a moral and ethical obligation and duty to care for patients, are actively being prevented from carrying out the practice of medicine as they’ve been trained to practice it,” Kathryn Hampton, a program officer for PHR and a co-author of the report, told the New York Times.
The study details a number of cases of agents intimidating doctors and hospital staff as they refused to leave physicians with patients for private exams and attempting to pressure doctors into discharging immigrants early.
PHR described the case of one critically ill patient who was shackled to a bed by agents who refused to give his doctor a reason for the restraints after repeated questioning.
“I couldn’t think of the rationale of chaining someone who is so sick he almost died,” the physician told PHR.
In other cases described in the report, agents insisted on standing guard in the room while patients were examined, had private conversations with their doctors, and demanded that the doors to patients’ rooms be kept open.
Supervision of a patient “makes sense if you have a prisoner that’s convicted of murder, but this is a different population, especially the asylum seekers,” Dr. Patricia Lebensohn, a physician in Tucson, Arizona, told the Times. “They’re not criminals.”
Under federal law, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is prohibited from arresting undocumented immigrants in certain “sensitive locations” including courthouses and hospitals. But as PHR reports, CBP agents frequently flout the law at community hospitals near the southern border:
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