Many Filipino healthcare workers in the US live in fear of ICE: 'This is my place of work. I should feel safe'

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Guardian

Mon 29 Dec 2025 10.00 EST
Last modified on Mon 29 Dec 2025 12.06 EST


In the Philippines, she spent three years providing end-of-life care for a family’s grandmother. When the grandmother died, family members told the healthcare worker to arrange her own way to the United States, where they operated home healthcare facilities. In California, they promised, she would have a place to stay and a stable job. They would look after her just as she had cared for their grandmother.

In 2018, the caregiver – who asked to be identified as Bella – arrived in Los Angeles on a tourist visa. She imagined herself working in healthcare facilities tucked in verdant hills or in beach communities. Instead, Bella, 57, said she landed in a shadow network of home healthcare jobs. She was shuttled among multiple facilities to avoid compliance checks and paid a fraction of a living wage. One job lasted eight months, she said, and paid $30 a day for 24-hour patient care.

“I’m thinking: ‘How could I live with that situation?’” said Bella. In Filipino culture, the concept of utang na loob, or a deep-seated sense of obligation to repay kindness, kept Bella tied to the family that she said ultimately exploited her labor and left her undocumented in the US. To break free, Bella lived in a church for months.

Many in the same situation fall deeper into the cracks of a system ripe for abuse, but Bella eventually joined a workers’ rights group that provided immigration and social services. She now earns just enough as a part-time independent home caregiver to pay taxes and rent a small room with a one-window view. That fragile sense of stability has been shaken by news of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arresting people who look like her at workplaces and at immigration check-in appointments.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/29/filipino-healthcare-workers-immigration-trump

[mahina]

1. Without people from the Phillipines we wonʻt have a functioning health care system at all, at least here in the islands.

This seems like yet another way to hurt us.

[markodochartaigh]

2. In Texas without nurses from India and Nigeria

most urban hospitals could not staff their units. I think that the Republican plan is to have the old and sick die off. Then AI can do some jobs and US workers who can't find jobs because other sectors of the economy have crashed can go into health care.
Of course "health care" administration will continue its robust growth.

[ClaudetteCC]

4. What are the root causes of this problem?

Why does the US need more healthcare workers than can be sourced with its current population? Why does the Phillipines, India, Nigeria and other countries have surplus healthcare workers to population that they can part with them for US benefit?

[travelingthrulife]

5. The goal might be to reduce local nursing or caregiver wages.

[markodochartaigh]

7. That's true as well.

The hospital for which I worked for three decades stopped paying time and a half for overtime. They did this retroactively. Our checks were short and they told us that we were now considered management. We were paid nothing for the first hour that we worked over and only straight time for any hours over 80 in two weeks. They got away with this for a decade, lawsuits and appeals to the labor board went nowhere. When I told other nurses that if we had a union this wouldn't happen they looked at me like I had three heads, even though the hospital was stealing from almost every nurse on almost every check. During this time the local newspaper did an investigation of the hospital district’s finances and found that more than one third of all dollars taken in by the hospital district went to administration. Naturally the hospital had difficulty finding enough US nurses, even for the "skeleton staffing" (their actual term) that they were so proud of.

[markodochartaigh]

6. Those other countries don't have surplus healthcare workers,

and that is part of the problem. Healthcare workers coming from those countries often leave their home countries without enough workers, basically a brain, or skills, drain. It ends up that whole schools in those countries produce workers for export to the US. People who would have been doctors or engineers, etc. in those countries end up going to nursing school so that they can emigrate to the US and make more as nurses than they could have made as doctors or engineers at home. And of course the health care worker population is exported as well.

As for why there aren't enough health care workers here, it used to be considered a woman's job, the jobs used to not be well paid, and many of the jobs are unpleasant. Health care is less often considered a woman's job now and pay has increased as much as ten times since the 80's. When I graduated and passed boards in 1983 I made about $5/hr as a registered nurse in Texas, and some of my classmates made $3.50-4.00 an hour in tiny hospitals which have long since closed and were virtually the only jobs in those towns. The work is still often unpleasant though. Many people find blood, secretions, and guts difficult to handle. And treatment by administration and patients' families can be very demeaning and demanding. There is also a saying in nursing that "nurses eat their own".

[mitch96]

3. I fear for the dental school here in Tampa.. A Large majority are from South Asia and South America..

Some from Eastern Europe. They are qualified Dentists in their home country and just need the practical hours and testing to get a US dental license. It would be easy pickings for ICE..
m

[Historic NY]

8. The VA employs many also