At What Cost? American Families are “Paying a Heavy Price” as Mass Deportation Agenda Takes a Toll on Immigrant Caregiving and Healthcare Workforce

Access online version of the press release HERE

Washington, DC — America’s Voice continues to pose the same essential question: “At what cost?” to Americans is the Trump administration willing to proceed with its costly mass deportation agenda? This week, the focus is on how Trump’s immigration and mass deportation dragnet will have on the caregiving and healthcare industries.

• In “How Trump’s immigration policies could worsen the health care worker shortage,” NPR reports, “More than 1 million noncitizen immigrants — one-third of them without legal status — work as doctors, nurses, nursing home aides and in other essential and increasingly hard-to-fill health care jobs in the U.S., a new analysis shows. As a result, President Trump’s threatened mass deportations and tightened immigration restrictions, if carried out, could lead to bottlenecks, gridlock and compromised care throughout American hospitals, nursing homes and the entire health care system, warned Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Hunter College health policy professor and one of the authors of a research letter published last week in JAMA.”
• The New York Times, “‘Where’s Alex?’ A Beloved Caregiver Is Swept Up in Trump’s Green Card Crackdown”: Featuring the heartbreaking story of a Falls Church, VA family that reels after their autistic son, “loses his caretaker as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown expands to permanent U.S. residents convicted of minor crimes years ago.”

• NBC News, “Immigration crackdowns disrupt caregivers. Families are paying the price.”: The story features the story of a New Jersey family worried about the potential deportation of the Venezuelan caregiver for their daughter, who suffers from a unique genetic condition and has a special bond with her caregiver. The article quotes Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, “a nonprofit representing more than 5,000 nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other services for aging patients” who said, “‘There’s just a general anxiety about what this could all mean, even if somebody is here legally … There’s concern about unfair targeting, unfair activity that could just create trauma, even if they don’t ultimately end up being deported, and that’s disruptive to a health care environment.’ Shutting down pathways for immigrants to work in the United States, Smith Sloan said, also means many other foreign workers may go instead to countries where they are welcomed and needed. ‘We are in competition for the same pool of workers.’”

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“American families struggling with the healthcare needs of family members are paying a heavy price for Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Countless American families in every state and every region who rely on trusted immigrant workers to assist their loved ones are now facing a crisis as their caregivers are summarily targeted or deported. None of this makes us safer or advances actual solutions to a broken immigration system. Instead, it inflicts needless suffering and fear on the most vulnerable Americans, their loved ones, and their caregivers.”