Health Politics

Doctors Protest ICE Detention Centers

By Swathi Kella

Staff writer

“Migration is a human right.”

“We see cruelty.”

“Deportations are taking our neighborhoods away.”

That’s how signs read during a mid-July protest in Foley Square over the deaths of seven children at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities on the nation’s southern border. Critics have condemned the facilities as unsanitary and unhealthy.

“I am an advocate in my exam room, in my community, on issues on a state level and on a national level,” Dr. Nina Agrawal, told this reporter. “I try and do advocacy on all levels, because I think it takes everything to make change happen.”

Agrawal, who chairs the injury and violence prevention committee for a New York chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, had helped organized the “Lights for Liberty” vigil. “I care for the kids and I vote,” read one of the buttons pinned to the front of it. “The kids sent me,” read another.

The protest’s co-organizer, Dr. Chanelle Diaz, an internal medicine doctor at the Bronx Comprehensive Health Care Center, said she has visited the detention centers three times over the last year. “It feels like a prison,” said Diaz, who toured the facilities at the request of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest’s health justice program.

Those being detained complained of delayed diagnoses for disease, including tuberculosis, and of not having soap and other hygiene products. “What I have seen there has really impacted me in that it’s something that I can’t un-see,” Diaz said. “The suffering and the pain that people are [experiencing] in detention, the lack of access to medical care, to basic nutrition, and just a complete disregard for their humanity … ”

In addition protesting in the streets, Diaz has been writing op-eds for news organizations, including Stat News and North Jersey. “Detention centers are designed to make people sick,” Diaz said, “and they are not necessary.”

Agrawal and Diaz led the crowd in protest chants, hollering into the mic: “When kids are separated from their parents, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”

Some in the crowd said the situation on the border resonated with them personally. “I’ve probably been interested in politics all my life. My father was a refugee from Eastern Europe and a Holocaust survivor,” said Dr. Bill Jordan, who practices family medicine at Montefiore Health System’s family health center in the Bronx and was one of 45 health professionals and medical students at the vigil.

“He actually came across the border in the middle of the night on a boat from Hungary to Austria and resettled with his family in the United States,” Jordan said, of his dad. “So, immigrant and refugee issues have always been important to me.”

Back during medical school, he said, he had researched post-traumatic stress disorder among refugees from French-speaking Africa who had landed in Montreal after escaping turmoil in their home countries.

The issue also was personal for Agrawal. A child of immigrants from India, Agrawal saw little difference between herself and those coming over the border. Her parents, she said, “were the American Dream. They went from nothing to something. They literally had nothing when they arrived … I do feel an obligation to help other families, other parents looking for a better life for their kids.”

Ami Kaplan, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn, also was in Foley Square that day. “I would say to the president,” she said, “ … ‘Your wife’s an immigrant, your past wife’s an immigrant, everyone around you is an immigrant.’ That’s what makes America great.”