A physician from Berkeley, California, has raised alarms after completing a routine medical training course that, for the first time, included content on constitutional rights, specifically the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The experience has left her deeply unsettled, believing she’s now being trained not just to practice medicine, but to operate in what she calls an emerging police state.
Dr. Dipti S. Barot is the California doctor in question, and she recently returned to clinical work after years on hiatus due to burnout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Barot initially expected to resume the usual responsibilities of primary care. Instead, she was met with new instructional modules covering search and seizure laws, Miranda rights, and how to respond to law enforcement entering clinical spaces, particularly to federal officers.
“I’m a doctor, not a lawyer. But there it was, sandwiched alongside the review on bloodborne pathogens and quizzes about HIPAA– information on unreasonable search and seizure and the right to remain silent. It was then that I realized that I was being prepared to be a doctor in an emerging police state,” according to Dr. Barot, transcript courtesy of Huffington Post
This shift in training apparently comes against a backdrop of rising fear and anxiety in her patient population. Screenings for anxiety and depression, Barot notes, are returning unprecedented results. Dr. Barot’s patients cite fear of deportation, family separation, and rising anti-immigrant sentiments, often naming former President Donald Trump as the root of their distress.
Among Barot’s patients: a woman terrified her husband would be detained at his next immigration check-in, a landscaper working alone after his crew stopped showing up out of fear of ICE, and a daughter with legal status too scared to visit her elderly parents abroad. Diagnoses like panic disorder, depression, and acute stress reaction are now routine, based on Dr. Barot’s experience in California.
Is It Getting Harder to Be Apolitical as a Doctor?
As political conditions intensify nationwide, it appears doctors like Barot are facing new ethical and professional frontlines. Recently, there have been cases where doctors had to protect undocumented patients from ICE raids. Dr. Barot thus argues that once-routine clinical decisions have become acts of resistance.
The irony is that a big chunk of healthcare workers (around 18-25 percent) in the US are foreign-born or came from migrant families. ICE and its heightened activities could very well force some healthcare workers or potential ones to leave the country and go to Canada instead.
Meanwhile, many people online were as distressed as Dr. Barot about ICE’s aggression and infringement on hospitals and medical facilities. Now, it appears that Dr. Barot and other California doctors or US doctors will also have to learn to defend both themselves and their patients against federal agents, a hard pill to swallow and something people online have sworn to protest against.
“The fact that this is even a story really shows the collapse of our democracy and the threat to our most basic rights,” points out FirstInteraction1817
“We will eventually have an even greater shortage of doctors and nurses than we currently have. Many will leave, many will be laid off, many will be forced to leave,” fears Disastrous_Basis3474
“Its boiling over…..we are gonna have to force this to end ourselves. Our government is the enemy,” claims GenericAnemone
