The ICE pandemic

https://www.vox.com/policy/479662/ice-immigration-school-kids-children-workers-covid-pandemic

No paywall link
https://archive.li/ZE0TK


Entire families sheltering in their homes, afraid to go outside. Children getting their lessons on iPad screens. Pregnant women skipping doctors’ appointments and considering home birth. A pervasive sense of confusion and terror — a feeling that “nothing is safe.”

These may sound like scenes from 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools and workplaces and sent families indoors, fearful of contracting a deadly disease. They’re also stories I heard in the last week, talking to doctors, educators, and advocates around the country about the impact of ICE on immigrant communities.

In Los Angeles, car wash workers are sheltering in place, driven from their jobs by round after round of immigration raids. “Family members, they’re just asking them: stay home,” said Flor Melendrez, executive director of the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, a nonprofit workers’ rights organization. “It’s not safe out there.”

In Minneapolis, a sense of “eerie calm” pervades Dr. Bryan Fate’s pediatric waiting room, as families skip their kids’ checkups for fear of being picked up by ICE. When kids do come in, they’re sicker.

“We’ve certainly seen infections that fester and get worse at home,” Fate, who practices at Children’s Minnesota health system, told me. Parents are “balancing the health of their child and the safety of their family, and that’s a terrible decision they have to make.”

*snip*