Sanctuary Politicians Turned the ER into a Battlefield

Last Friday night, ICE officers in Los Angeles did what the detention standards require of them. A detainee in their custody asked to see a doctor, so they drove him to the emergency room at White Memorial Medical Center in Boyle Heights.

By the next afternoon the incoming mayor of Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, was standing at a protest outside that hospital, telling the cameras that ICE had obstructed the emergency room and detained two U.S. citizens. Mayor Karen Bass piled on. Neither one bothered to mention why ICE was there in the first place. They brought a sick man in for treatment.

What happened in between is the part that should worry everyone. Word got out that ICE was at the hospital. Activists flooded the parking lot. Video shows people getting in officers’ faces and the encounter turning physical. Officers formed a line at the ambulance bay to protect themselves and their prisoner, the hospital diverted ambulances for about two hours, and two people were arrested. One of them, according to the officer on video, for assaulting a federal agent.

Nobody wants ambulances diverted. I certainly don’t. But ask yourself why there was a mob in a hospital parking lot at midnight to begin with.

I have seen this movie before. When I was running enforcement operations in New York, we were working the removal of a well-known activist. When he learned his stay had been denied, he fainted. EMS asked him, in front of his wife and his lawyers, if he wanted to go to the hospital. He said yes. Within minutes a crowd had convinced itself that ICE staged the whole thing. Activists, state assemblymen and sitting members of Congress lay down in the street to stop the FDNY ambulance from leaving. His wife sat inside the rig feeding live updates to the organizers outside. A man who needed a hospital could not get to one, because the people claiming to protect him were lying in front of the ambulance.

About eighteen months ago I put that story in written testimony before Congress after the mayor of Newark was arrested outside Delaney Hall. I warned that turning ICE facilities into political stages would get someone hurt. The officers, the detainees, the bystanders, even the protesters. All of them at risk.

I wish I’d been wrong.

Since then, Delaney Hall has been under near-constant siege. In May, crowds surrounded the facility over a claimed hunger strike that DHS says never happened, and officers trying to leave were physically blocked. A United States senator walked among the protesters. It got bad enough that Newark imposed a curfew and state police took over the perimeter.

In Minneapolis, the Whipple Federal Building has seen protests almost daily since January. Rocks and chunks of ice thrown at officers. A reporter tackled. A city councilman vowing the protests will continue as long as the building operates. Outside Chicago, protesters at the Broadview facility threw tear gas canisters back at officers, and four local and state cops were hurt in a later clash. In Dallas, a gunman opened fire on an ICE facility, and the people who got shot were detainees.

DHS now counts 647 assaults on ICE personnel between January 2025 and this past September. Over the same stretch of the last administration, there were 37.

So why does this keep happening, years after New York and after every warning?

Because it works, and because nobody pays for it. The playbook is the same in every city. A rumor goes out on social media. A rapid response network mobilizes within the hour. Local politicians show up, not to calm things down, but to get in front of the cameras. Officers get boxed in, the video gets clipped, and by morning the story is that ICE did something wrong. The officer who got punched is the villain. The person who threw the punch is a “community member.”

Then the sanctuary machine kicks in, starting with the local police who are supposed to keep the peace.

In October 2025, outside Chicago, about 30 Border Patrol agents were rammed and boxed in by a crowd. They called the Chicago Police Department for help. A dispatch message from the department’s chief of patrol said no units would respond. In Minneapolis this past winter, an ICE officer called police to say he was trapped in his vehicle while a hostile crowd pelted him. Nobody came. Back in 2018, Portland’s mayor ordered his police not to answer ICE’s calls for help, and the ICE building there has been a flashpoint ever since.

Los Angeles is no different. In June 2025, when more than a thousand rioters surrounded a federal building, ICE’s acting director said LAPD took over two hours to show up. LAPD blamed traffic. At White Memorial, LAPD did respond to the crowd, and I have no doubt the ICE officers on that line appreciated the assistance. But every time ICE shows up somewhere, LAPD leadership rushes out a statement that it does not do immigration enforcement. Nobody asked them to. A mob surrounding officers at a hospital isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s a public safety call, and that is the one job a police department can’t opt out of. When the activists know the local cops have been told to keep their distance, they know they can push.

The politicians are worse, because they know exactly what they’re doing. Mayor-elect Raman went on X the morning after, with the facts nowhere near settled, and told the world ICE had blocked an emergency room. She knew how it would play. The video would get clipped, the headline would say ICE shut down an ER, and nobody would remember the detainee who needed a doctor. A Minneapolis councilman promises the Whipple protests will go on as long as the building stands. A senator walks among the crowd at Delaney Hall. Los Angeles County tells its hospitals to keep officers guarding a detainee out of patient areas without a judge’s warrant. These officials ignore the violence because the optics serve them. They amplify the outrage and condemn the officers instead of telling their own supporters to step back. When someone finally gets hurt, they’ll be the first to call for an investigation. Of ICE.

Here is what the people cheering this on refuse to understand. ICE is legally required to give detainees medical care, and much of that care happens at outside hospitals. If every hospital run becomes a standoff, officers are left with two bad choices: take a sick detainee to the ER and risk a riot, or wait. The detainee pays for that. So does every other patient who needed that ambulance bay.

The fix is not complicated. Hospitals that regularly treat detainees should work out a secure entrance and a point of contact with ICE ahead of time, so nobody ever has to form a line across an ambulance bay. Congress should make it a federal crime to obstruct officers moving a prisoner to or from medical care, the same way it protects access to clinics and houses of worship. And the Justice Department should charge every assault on a federal officer under the statute already on the books, no matter whose name is on the protest permit or the voter registration.

People have every right to protest. Nobody has the right to block a gate, surround a vehicle or put their hands on an officer. That goes for a senator in Newark and a mayor-elect in Los Angeles just as much as it goes for anyone else.

The men and women of ICE are enforcing laws Congress wrote. Getting a detainee to a doctor shouldn’t make them the enemy. If our leaders keep pretending otherwise, someone is going to die in one of these parking lots, and they will have no one to blame but themselves.