Nurse Gives a Speech After Person Assaulted and Kidnapped By ICE on October 16th Is Brought to Their Hospital
I have been debating long and hard as to wether or not showing my face as I give this speech would be a wise decision. I see activists covering their faces and I have gone in and out of that myself. I think when we cover our faces we need to be mindful about it. Direct action often does require face coverings and this is a little different.
I decided that in this context, when where my community is loving and present and has been showing up, that I owe it to them to show my face. Even as my heart races and I am watched from above by the very sherriffs that escorted ICE into our hospital. Retaliation against us has already happened and will probably continue to happen, for power does not concede willingly. But I need you all to know, when I see you here, that I am a friendly face. They are trying to make us into them, They are trying to make us, nurses and medical staff into law enforcement for a pedophile protectorate, an Epstein Elite
Before I go any further, I want our community members to know that there are a handful of us working tirelessly on the inside of this hospital to make sure you are able to access your healthcare. So please come to your appointments. If your risk level is high and your medical situation is not emergent, ask your clinician, your doctor or Nurse Practitioner for a video appointment. WE are here for you, we have been, and will continue to find a way. And we have found those ways with little to no help from our administration. The same policies they “briefed” but actually propagandized our assembly member Nikki Fortunado Bas on for over an hour, did not come from them, they came from us. Bas spent a 10th of the time she spent inside this hospital with our hospital administrators than she did with us, but somehow we are to be grateful for her service in writing a policy that refuses to condemn the actions of our onsite Sheriff’s department as collusion, when they allow agents to store their vehicles in our parking garages for their own safety? The policies she was briefed on were a watered down version of the policiy that did not come from our administration. It came from us screaming at them for months to do something. From us screaming for this need, while Minnesota, Chicago, LA and other cities were being occupied by our home grown federal secret police, aka Gestapo, aka fugitive slave catchers.
A handful of us on our unit, not the hospital administrators themselves, came up with trainings to keep us in compliance with SB-81. Senate Bill 81 says that the hospital needs to provide training for staff on how to handle immigration enforcement operations that are attempted within our hospitals. We were in compliance for about a week but that didn’t stop hospital administrators from lauding our efforts around town and telling the Board of Supervisors that they themselves had come up with these policies.
We personaly, a couple of nurses and a midwife developed trainings for doctors who are getting little to no help on what to do as immigration authorities test our safety mechanisms and try to occupy our hospitals and then the administration tells me how great it is that I have come up with this “volunteer project”, equating it to a hobby, to a pet project of ours that does not require compensation.
The watered down version of the policy they adopted includes a rapid response number that can be reached by dialling 5555 and dispatches us to an Administrator on Call or AOC who is part of the same executive c-suite team responsibel for diverting millions of dollars away from the continued employement of medical staff towards bonuses for themselves. One of these bonuses included $200,000.00 on top of an $800,000.00 annual salaray for the CEO James Jackson who has been riding on the coat tails of his father’s legacy for too long. Consequently, I have zero confidence that whoever we call from this “rapid resonse number will do anything more than hold the door open for ICE/CBP/ Boarder Patrol/ or the FBI. And let’s be clear, they are all the same at this point. The Trump administration has even been deputizing IRS agents that are able to meet the sufficient level of psychopathy. From what we’ve seen over the past few days, all our Sherifs, SFPD, and OPD have been doing is providing a perimeter for ICE to safely kidnap people.
If the hospital administrators want to do anything for us, all they need to do is determine if the detention is legal or not then give us the floor, watch what WE do then make it into one of their paper policies that no one ever looks at. So far they can’t even do the bare minnimum to determine wether the detention is legal or not and instead they deflect all our inquiries and bow down to the genocidal pedophilic war criminals that we call the US federal administration. We even see complicency with our own Governer Gavin Newsom who has presidential aspirations of his own and recently struck down legislation that would bar any former ICE agents from jobs with the State of California.
In Los Angeles, a community member was drugged and questioned about their immigration status by ICE. The cooperation of the medical staff in doing this was because they were scared and more importantly because they had no training!
The Trump administration including Stephen Miller, Markwayne Mullin, Tom Homan, Pete Hegseth, Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick and the rest are all complicent in empowering the death squads that now invade our streets. They have proposed hospitals as potential detention sites and want to make: nurses, doctors and other medical staff into law enforcement. Will we let them do that?!
Aside: I also heard another speaker say that the agent who had brutalized Eduardo Garcia, was told by his supervisor that he shouldn’t have done that. Not because he did anything wrong but because they “didn’t want the smoke”. That smoke came in the form of us not allowing them to take even one of us from this hospital without a fight. The reason they haven’t been running us ragged at Highland is because our team is tight and almost every person that they have attempted to beat up and bring through our hospital to clear of their injuries has been met with community and legal support inside and outside of the hospital and again, not because of anything our administration has done.
Audio version available on Substack
