The ICEmen Cometh

The potential effects of the current ICE actions on public health

The post The ICEmen Cometh first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Tweet

**Shares

**

**

**

**

**

**

**

**

**

**

Why would a blog about medicine and science need to address what appears to be a purely political question? Promotion of science-based medicine shouldn’t be obscured by unnecessary forays into partisan politics. But our current political crisis affects every facet of our public health environment.

Public health is always political, but does not have to be partisan—there is clear evidence that the current public health policies are broadly unpopular across the political spectrum. While we may disagree on policy goals and methods, we do seem to agree that masked secret police operating with complete impunity is a bad thing. And whatever the political consequences, it is bad for public health. And we have the science to back that up.

The ICE crackdowns affect public health directly, indirectly, and synergistically with other policies. They aren’t separate from the administration’s attacks on public health. It may seem strange at first to link ICE activities with the dismantling of our public health infrastructure by Kennedy et al. but these are inseparable. The gutting and politicization of the CDC and NIH cannot be separated from violent immigration enforcement and policing. For example, if the CDC and NIH don’t track data related to law enforcement violence, it’s hard to study. And if people are scared away from seeking healthcare due to immigration actions (and I had to stop myself from typing “Aktions”) people will sicken and die.

Shock and confusion

Since the Trump Administration’s transformation of ICE into a masked secret police force, much of (white) America has stared at their screens in shock. Nothing that has happened has surprised minority communities that have always been subject to police abuses. But the egregious and unpredictable scenes of masked, militarized forces invading peaceful neighborhoods have awakened even the most complacent among us. At the same time, Americans are wondering where to turn for health data, vaccinations, and reliable advice as the usual sources are torn down and/or turned into Kennedy’s private playground. For now, let’s focus on the potential effects of the current ICE actions on public health.

Police violence is an established public health issue, with its associated experts and academic literature. There are many barriers to studying police violence, perhaps the biggest being the lack of mandatory reporting. Most importantly, when the state that perpetrates violence is also responsible for collecting public health data, there is an inevitable conflict of interest, and as recent events have shown us, public health is very much subject to political censorship.Again, the gutting of public health and violent policing are a mutually dependent part of our current political situation.

Our modern life in which everyone has a camera makes it hard for the state to hide. Pictures of chemical weapons being used outside of schools, children being torn from their parents, people being murdered in what amount to concentration camps,and (white) people being murdered and vilifiedhave made our current crisis hard to ignore. (As an aside, this one hit home since he is a fellow healthcare worker. But Trump’s policies were already harming my colleagues. Many of our hospital nurses and ancillary staff are immigrants and therefore under threat. Many of our doctors are immigrants—so many that many of our hospitals could not survive without them. And the US does not produce enough doctors to fill the gap.)

You’re not from around here, are you?

Recent ICE crackdowns take invasive policing to a new level. There is plenty of social science literature showing the negative effects of invasive policing on individual and population health. Before the current crackdown, there were about 75,000 hospitalizations caused by interactions with police every year, and about 600 deaths.

Digging deeper, a 2016 study looking especially at “Terry Stops” (snagging people for “looking suspicious”) showed significant negative health effects not only for those who were subject to “stop and frisk” but also those living in the neighborhoods where this sort of policing is used. Another systematic review showed adverse outcomes on Black youth who had contact with police.

Knowing this, we should be able to infer the negative effects of so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” where ICE officers (I consciously stopped myself from typing “goons”) are supposedly allowed to stop anyone who they think may look like an “illegal immigrant”. The Supreme Court decision that allows this is either supremely naive, intentionally oppressive, or both. The results were completely predictable based on both data and common sense, and our doom-scrolling certainly highlights the inevitable abuses. Kavanaugh’s decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo implies that ICE grabbing up “suspicious” people is not particularly harmful:

[A]s for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.

—Noem V. Vasques Perdomo

The news belies this as we see citizens and non-citizens alike hauled off in a typically not-so-brief way. And public health research shows us wider harms.

[...]

Original source

📄 25a169_5h25.pdf