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Fact check: How many undocumented immigrants have been arrested by ICE in hospitals since 2020?
Executive Summary
The available documents do not establish a specific, verifiable count of how many undocumented immigrants ICE arrested inside hospitals since 2020; federal ICE public reports for FY2020 provide broad arrest and removal totals but do not disaggregate arrests by location such as hospitals [1] [2]. Recent reporting and opinion pieces from 2025 document increased ICE presence and high-profile hospital encounters that have raised clinician, patient, and legislative responses, but those articles likewise do not supply a comprehensive nationwide arrest tally [3] [4] [5].
1. What the official numbers actually show — and what they omit
ICE’s FY2020 Enforcement and Removal Operations report lists overall operational totals — 103,603 arrests and 185,884 removals for the year — but the report does not break those figures down by specific arrest locations such as hospitals or medical facilities [2]. The FY2020 narrative acknowledges pandemic-related disruptions that changed enforcement patterns, noting temporary decreases in many traditional metrics, but it gives no hospital-specific arrest counts and provides no methodology for isolating such events from the aggregate totals [1]. In short, federal public reporting from ICE for 2020 lacks the granularity needed to answer the question numerically.
2. Journalistic reporting documents incidents but not comprehensive totals
Multiple news stories across 2020 and 2025 report specific cases of ICE arrests or agent activity at hospitals and emergency rooms, including an early 2020 arrest outside a Scranton ER that drew legal concern [6], and 2025 coverage describing ICE agents operationally directing care in a Los Angeles-area hospital [3]. These pieces provide anecdotal evidence of arrests and interference but they do not attempt nor claim to enumerate all hospital arrests since 2020. The articles aim to highlight patterns and impacts rather than produce a nationwide quantitative count [3] [4].
3. Healthcare workers’ testimony highlights frequency and consequence — not a census
Opinion columns and firsthand accounts in 2025 describe ICE agents entering hospitals, demanding records, and influencing treatment decisions, with nurses and doctors reporting multiple encounters and urging staff protections [5]. These sources stress operational and ethical impacts on care-seeking behavior and clinical decision-making, documenting repeated interactions in some hospitals. The contributions are rich on qualitative detail and consequences — including chilling effects on patient willingness to seek care — but they do not provide a verifiable total number of arrests across jurisdictions [5] [4].
4. Legal and policy shifts changed the enforcement landscape but not reporting standards
Reporting notes that federal policy changes since the Trump-era rollback of a prior hospital non-enforcement guideline coincided with increased ICE hospital activity and prompted state-level responses [7]. California’s SB 81, passed in 2025, is an example of a legislative attempt to limit ICE access to non-public hospital areas absent a warrant and to require staff training [8]. These policy developments alter where and how enforcement occurs, complicating any attempt to produce a consistent, comparable count across time and states because enforcement practices and recording standards vary [7] [8].
5. Why independent counts are scarce and difficult to compile
No centralized public dataset compiles arrests by specific locations such as hospitals; ICE reports aggregate arrests without place-of-arrest fields in publicly released summaries [2]. News outlets and advocates can document incidents via reporting and FOIA requests, but such approaches produce partial lists prone to selection biases: high-profile cases are likelier to be reported, while smaller or rural incidents may go undocumented. The absence of uniform reporting standards or mandatory hospital-level disclosure means that producing a reliable nationwide number requires systematic data collection beyond the scope of available sources [1].
6. Conflicting agendas shape how the topic is covered and framed
Reporting varies between accounts emphasizing patient safety and clinician duty to protect privacy and those focusing on immigration enforcement priorities; both frames use selective examples to support policy positions [3] [7]. Healthcare-focused pieces emphasize chilling effects and patient confidentiality, while enforcement-oriented documents highlight threats to public safety and operational successes without granular location data [2] [4]. These differing agendas explain why some outlets prioritize narratives and legal analysis over numerical aggregation, and they caution against drawing policy conclusions from isolated incidents alone.
7. Bottom line and what would be needed for a specific number
Given the available materials, the verifiable conclusion is that no public source among the supplied documents provides a comprehensive count of undocumented immigrants arrested by ICE in hospitals since 2020 [1] [2] [3]. To produce a defensible nationwide total would require either ICE to publish arrest counts by location or a coordinated, cross-jurisdictional data collection effort combining FOIA-obtained enforcement logs with hospital incident reports and state-level records — a project not represented in the current sources [2] [8].