‘They’re the backbone’: Trump’s targeting of legal immigrants threatens health sector

The Trump administration’s efforts to strip protections from more than half a million legal immigrants could devastate the health sector, endangering care for the elderly and worsening rates of both chronic and infectious diseases.

Hundreds of thousands of health care workers, including an estimated 30,000 legal immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, are at risk of being deported — worrying providers and patients who rely on them for everything from nursing and physical therapy to maintenance, janitorial, foodservice and housekeeping work.