Last summer’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations left many foreign-born residents of Los Angeles afraid to venture outdoors, even when their health depended on it.
A new study from USC finds that emergency room visits from patients born outside of the U.S. fell by more than 20% in the first four weeks after arrests escalated in June 2025.
Those who did come in were significantly more likely to require hospitalization than U.S.-born patients, suggesting that they were postponing treatment until they were seriously ill.
The study looked at patient data at three Los Angeles safety-net hospitals: Los Angeles General Medical Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and Olive View-UCLA Medical Center.
Prior to enforcement escalation in June, the three emergency rooms saw a cumulative weekly average of 1,943 U.S.-born patients and 2,367 foreign-born patients, with the majority hailing from Mexico and Central or South America.
Once arrests began, hospital staff noticed an immediate change in patient volume.
“Everyone was coming back from their shifts reporting that there was no one in the emergency room, no one in the hospital” compared with a typical shift, said lead author Sarah Axeen, an assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
Immigrant patients who did come into the ER during the first four weeks after June 5, 2025, were significantly more likely to be sick enough to require hospitalization. Admission rates increased 4.8 percentage points among Mexican-born patients, 5.1 percentage points among patients born in Central or South America, and 2.5 percentage points among patients born in Asia.
ER visits by immigrant patients eventually rebounded somewhat, but remained 10% lower than pre-enforcement levels in October 2025. There was no change in hospital usage by U.S.-born patients during the observation period.
The study was published Monday in the Journal JAMA Network Open.
The data mirrors what other clinics serving low-income patients saw during the raids.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, monthly emergency room visits by non-English speaking patients were down 16% from June to August 2025 compared with monthly averages in the first five months of the year, a hospital spokesperson said.
At the peak of enforcement operations, some 35% of scheduled visits to St. John’s Community Health’s clinics were no-shows, up from 9% before the raids began, president Jim Mangia said. “Patients were not coming in for care until it was more acute. They were forgoing care until it became unbearable,” Mangia said.
During the raids, St. John’s launched a program called Healthcare Without Fear to provide virtual and home visits to patients concerned about the prospect of arrest.
As ICE raids have started to rise in Los Angeles once again, so have patient no-shows, Mangia said. Management is meeting this week to determine if they need to start Healthcare Without Fear back up.
