Julia Chavez picked up when her phone rings in the middle of the night. This scenario has played out several times, but during this late-night phone call, the person on the other end urgently asked her to translate.

“They’re at the hospital, and you can hear that they’re scared,” said Chavez, the founder and CEO of Columbus-based nonprofit Saving Grace Mission, remembering one of several such calls she has received. “They’re intimidated, and you can hear the frustration from the doctors on the other end.”

Hospitals, once protected against immigration enforcement, have increasingly become sites of anxiety and fear after President Donald Trump rescinded a long-standing policy in January that allowed immigrants access to health care providers, along with schools and churches, without fear of apprehension. Combined with heightened federal immigration enforcement in recent months, the change has left many immigrant families afraid to visit hospitals or attend routine medical appointments, health professionals and advocates told Mississippi Today. Some are skipping care altogether.

These new challenges are layered atop the barriers that immigrants already face accessing health care, such as language divides and limited access to public health insurance. More recently, experts say, federal funding cuts and changes to immigration policy have further reduced resources available to immigrant communities. 

Maria, a Biloxi resident who immigrated from Honduras and asked that her last name not be published, told Mississippi Today she and her two children have missed routine doctor’s appointments because they are “terrified” to leave the house amid an increased presence of federal immigration officers. Her husband, who has authorization to work in the U.S., was detained for two months earlier this year. 

Both of her children are U.S. citizens. 

“We haven’t taken them for their vaccinations,” she said in Spanish. “No, they haven’t had their annual checkups and things like that,” she said.  

Michael Oropeza, the director of El Pueblo, a nonprofit serving low-income immigrant communities, said the organization has witnessed families delay care, cancel children’s check-ups and go without refilling medication because they worry they could be detained by immigration officials. 

“It’s not because they don’t value their health, it’s because they don’t feel safe,” Oropeza said. “When hospitals and clinics are no longer that safe place, people withdraw trust that took years to build up. It can disappear overnight.” 

Immigration officers descended on New Orleans Dec. 3 as a part of the latest federal immigration crackdown, dubbed “Catahoula Crunch.” Early reports showed the campaign aimed to arrest roughly 5,000 people in Louisiana and southeastern Mississippi. Though arrests in Mississippi have been more sporadic than in nearby Louisiana, fear has swiftly rippled through immigrant communities in the state.

Some health care providers said they have seen a sudden drop-off in immigrant patients seeking care.

The Good Samaritan Medical Clinic in Columbus provides free primary health care services to residents of the Lowndes County area. The health center saw an influx in patients from immigrant communities in the beginning of the year, said Board Chairman Dr. William Rosenblatt.

Most of the new patients the clinic was seeing were seeking “non-trivial” medical care, such as very high blood pressure and blood sugar levels, Rosenblatt said. The clinic was building trust with the patients.

“We were able to really, I felt like, do some good,” he said. “And then, radio silence.” 

By the summer, visits from immigrant communities tapered off, he said, falling to zero in the past three to four months.

The chronic diseases the clinic was previously treating may not have immediate consequences, but will if they are left untreated, he said. 

“With a lot of these uncontrolled chronic diseases that we were seeing and the magnitude of how uncontrolled they were, it’s just sad to think about,” he said. 

When people delay routine care, it can put stress on emergency rooms, which are required by federal law to treat all patients, regardless of their immigration status or ability to pay. 

“When these folks do end up with these awful end stages of the disease — they have a massive stroke, they have a massive heart attack — they’re coming to our ER, right?,” he said. “They’re going to get emergency care. And what an additional strain that is on the healthcare system when we could have intervened with some prevention.”

Verba Moore, the clinic manager for Bethel Clinic, a free walk-in clinic in Biloxi, said staff members have observed fewer Hispanic and Vietnamese patients at the health center than usual over the course of the last four to six months. 

Since President Trump took office in January, the number of immigrant adults who reported skipping or postponing health care has increased, according to a recent survey from KFF and The New York Times. Four in 10 immigrant adults – and nearly twice as many likely undocumented immigrants — say immigration-related worries have spurred negative health impacts, including anxiety, difficulty sleeping or eating, and worsening health conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure. 

Among those who said they went without care, about 1 in 5 cited immigration-related concerns as reasons for delaying care. Even more — 63% — cited cost or lack of coverage.

Affordability and health insurance coverage are some of the most significant barriers to accessing health care immigrants face, said Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for public health insurance programs, like Medicaid and Medicare, and some immigrants who are lawfully present in the U.S. are not eligible for the programs. 

Fewer lawfully present immigrants will be eligible for Medicaid or Affordable Care Act Marketplace financial assistance as a result of changes made in the federal budget reconciliation law signed by President Donald Trump in July. These changes, which will begin in 2026, will impact refugees, people granted political asylum and victims of domestic violence and trafficking. 

Cuello said some people who are eligible for public benefits may choose to disenroll in health insurance for fear of information being shared with immigration officials. The Trump administration provided deportation officials with personal and health data, including immigration statuses, of millions of Medicaid enrollees earlier this year despite concerns about privacy violations. In August, a federal court in California temporarily blocked the data sharing in 20 states that filed suit over the data sharing. 

In November, the Trump administration took steps to reverse a policy that prevented federal officials from considering a person’s use of certain public benefits, like Medicaid, when determining whether they might become a “public charge,” or person reliant on government assistance. Federal officials are allowed to deny entry to people they determine are likely to become a public charge. 

Research shows that some immigrant families disenrolled themselves and their children from benefits they were eligible for after the first Trump administration in 2019 broadened the scope of programs the federal government would consider in public charge determinations to include previously excluded health, nutrition and housing programs.

The change impacted many children and U.S. citizens, Cuello said. About 1 in 4 children in the U.S. have at least one immigrant parent, and many rely on Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits. 

“When mom or dad is afraid to enroll in health coverage or enroll for food benefits, you are impacting a lot of people who are U.S. citizens and kids,” said Cuello. 

Maria’s children, who are U.S. citizens, previously qualified for Medicaid, but she disenrolled them three years ago out of concern that using public benefits would jeopardize her family’s residency applications, she said. The family now pays for their children’s care out-of-pocket. 

Cuello noted that the effects of these federal policy changes extend far beyond those who are targeted. 

“The chilling effect associated with it is gargantuan,” he said. 

Federal funding cuts have also impacted immigrant communities’ access health care in Mississippi. 

El Pueblo, which has locations in Biloxi and Forrest, previously operated a community health worker program in Columbus. The program helped transport people to doctor’s appointments, complete forms and find affordable health care. 

But their contract with the Mississippi State Department of Health was terminated in March 2025 as a result of cancellations of hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief and used for a number of other public health initiatives. The nonprofit closed its Columbus office as a result. 

“That was basically loss of access to health care for the immigrant community,” Chavez said. “And that was the first time that we ever had access to health care for the immigrant community here.”

Rosenblatt said for him, it is a loss to be unable to serve those communities in the Columbus area. 

“They’re literally building our community,” he said. “And we’re no longer able to give them the support they need, and yeah, it breaks my heart a little bit.”

Mississippi Today reported in June that the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s electronic health record system included a field for “citizenship.” The medical center declined to comment on whether the hospital system asks for this information when patients are admitted, or whether the hospital has a policy about how to respond to federal immigration enforcement at the hospital. Mississippi does not require hospitals to collect citizenship information from patients.

Alicia Carpenter, a spokesperson for Merit Health, said this month the hospital system works to serve the medical needs of its patients while complying with the law. 

“If an ICE agent arrives intending to apprehend a patient or another person suspected of being undocumented, we will treat the agent in the same manner as we would any other law enforcement agency,” Carpenter said. “Our staff will not resist or interfere with efforts by law enforcement agencies to apprehend or question the individual.”

Baptist Memorial Hospitals also work to balance commitments to patient privacy and compliance with state and federal law, said spokesperson Kimberly Alexander in an email. 

Singing River Health System spokesperson Samantha Fletcher declined to answer questions about its policies regarding immigration enforcement. 

Once it feels safe to attend doctor’s appointments again, Maria said her top priority will be seeking mental health care to address the stress her family has endured. Her children cope with worry daily about what could happen to the family amid increased federal immigration enforcement, even though the parents hold visas and their children are citizens. 

“They come and ask us, ‘What’s going to happen?’” she said. “Because we also have two dogs, ‘What’s going to happen to the dogs?’ They don’t want to leave them because they adore their dogs.”