Maria Kallmeyer Provides Insight for Healthcare Risk Management Article About Onsite Immigration Enforcement
Maria Kallmeyer, national co-chair of the Quarles & Brady Immigration & Mobility Practice Group who is based in the firm’s Chicago office, was quoted in a Healthcare Risk Management article about how health care leaders should prepare for the possibility of attempts at immigration enforcement within their facilities.
New immigration enforcement regulations enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to pursue enforcement actions in locations previously considered off limits, including health care facilities. In the article, which covered a variety of steps health care organizations should take to prepare for this possibility, Kallmeyer addressed the scope of the new policy.
An excerpt:
Healthcare organizations are under more scrutiny by immigration authorities now, says Maria Kallmeyer, JD, partner with the Quarles law firm in Chicago. Previously, there was an understanding that ICE would not go into certain locations looking for people to arrest for immigration purposes. Those were mainly schools, hospitals, churches, and similar locations where society wants people to feel safe, she explains.
“Now, ICE has said there are no protected locations. They are going to go anywhere they need to go to find undocumented people who should be arrested and deported,” Kallmeyer says. “I don’t think that means ICE has an initiative to raid hospitals and healthcare organizations because a raid is generally reserved for situations where ICE has reason to believe that there is some larger criminal activity going on there that impacts a lot of people,” she says. “What’s happening right now is they’re looking for specific individuals who they have reason to believe should be arrested or deported. There’s some level of anxiety going around because of all the publicity around it, and because I think the administration intended, on some level, to make people nervous, to deter other folks from coming [into the country].”
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