Nurses Union Backs Bill to Abolish ICE and Recast Public Safety Around Care
National Nurses United has endorsed Representative Delia Ramirez’s Reimagining Safety Act, a sweeping proposal that would abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, terminate immigration enforcement agreements with state and local law enforcement, close Guantanamo Bay, and create a Department of Community Safety. The union framed the bill as a direct challenge to a federal enforcement structure it says has harmed immigrant communities and diverted public resources away from health care and social support.
The endorsement places nursing labor squarely inside a broader debate over what public safety means when measured against health outcomes, hospital access, and community trust. For NNU, the argument is not symbolic. The union tied the bill to a vision in which federal dollars move away from policing and detention and toward Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public education, climate justice, and other programs intended to reduce downstream illness and instability.
The statement is unusually expansive for a health care organization, but the underlying logic is familiar to clinicians working in under-resourced settings. Violence, detention, family separation, fear of deportation, and disrupted access to care all translate into delayed presentation, missed appointments, worsening chronic disease, and avoidable emergencies. A public health framework that treats those exposures as health risks, rather than merely political abstractions, is central to the union’s endorsement.
ICE has only existed for a few decades.
Hospital Closures and the Pressure on Community Care
NNU also linked the bill to its broader warning about the fragility of the safety net. In a July 2026 report, the union said more than 600 safety net hospitals are at risk of closure or essential service cuts because of H.R. 1, which it described as worsening financial strain on rural and community hospitals. The practical consequence is easy to track at the bedside: when a local hospital loses services or shuts down, patients travel farther, arrive sicker, and face greater barriers to timely treatment.
That pattern matters most in regions already operating with thin margins. Emergency care, obstetrics, behavioral health, and dialysis access are among the services most vulnerable when a hospital’s finances collapse. Nurses, meanwhile, face job losses and workload intensification when facilities cut staff or close entirely. In that setting, the union’s endorsement of the Reimagining Safety Act reads as both ideological and operational, because the same forces that strain hospitals also widen health disparities.
The statement argues that immigration enforcement itself functions as a public health threat. NNU described ICE as an agency that has caused bodily injury, imprisonment, and fear in communities, and it specifically referenced the deaths of registered nurse Alex Pretti, Renée Nicole Good, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, and other victims as part of its case for abolition. Those claims are presented in moral language rather than clinical trial language, but the health-system implication is clear: a population that fears government contact is less likely to seek preventive care, disclose symptoms early, or engage with public institutions.
Medicare, Safety Net Spending, and the Nurse’s View of Prevention
NNU’s endorsement also reflects a long-standing nursing emphasis on prevention over punishment. The bill would redirect funding away from federal immigration enforcement and toward social supports the union says would improve health and security: guaranteed health coverage, childcare, education, and climate-related investment. From a clinical perspective, those are upstream determinants of health, not fringe add-ons. Stable insurance improves access to primary care and medications. Childcare support affects parents’ ability to attend appointments and maintain employment. Education and climate policy shape exposure, risk, and resilience over time.
The union said the bill aligns with nurses’ values and with its vision for a healthy society. That language carries particular weight because nurses often see the aftermath of structural neglect in exam rooms, emergency departments, and wards before it ever reaches a policy hearing. When a parent cannot afford care, when a family avoids a clinic because immigration enforcement feels nearby, or when a rural hospital no longer has the capacity to keep a service line open, the consequence is clinical rather than theoretical.
No endpoint analysis can be extracted from a press release of this kind, and none is needed to understand its public health message. The proposal is not about tweaking an existing program; it is a wholesale attempt to redefine safety through social investment and the removal of coercive immigration machinery. For NNU, the fact pattern is enough to justify endorsement: hospital closures are mounting, enforcement harms are documented in the union’s view, and federal spending is being pulled away from care.
A Political Fight Framed as a Health Policy Argument
The Reimagining Safety Act is as much a statement about power as it is about governance. By calling for repeal of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the bill would eliminate ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and DHS as they currently exist. It also seeks to close Guantanamo Bay and end immigration enforcement agreements between state and local agencies and the federal government. Those provisions would be politically explosive in any Congress, yet NNU’s endorsement suggests that nurses see them through a different lens: who gets protected, who gets harmed, and how public money is allocated when communities are under strain.
That framing matters in health policy because resource allocation shapes disease burden long before a patient appears in the clinic. A system that funds detention and enforcement at scale while safety net hospitals are threatened with closure will predictably produce more barriers to care. A system that invests in care, housing, education, and insurance would push in the opposite direction. The bill’s supporters are making that case explicitly, with nurses positioned not as distant commentators but as frontline witnesses to what chronic underinvestment does to patients.
NNU said it will continue to call for ICE’s abolition and has held multiple actions in support of that goal, including efforts to protect nurses from detention and to protest what it describes as community harassment and endangerment. The immediate policy question is not whether the union’s stance will satisfy its critics. It is whether Congress is prepared to treat enforcement, hospital financing, and social support as parts of the same public health equation.
The legislation’s fate in Washington remains uncertain, but the message from one of the nation’s largest nursing organizations is unmistakable: safety, in this view, is built through care, not detention.