Patients’ immigration concerns can be addressed when clinicians adopt a public health approach to caring: wearing buttons, distributing brochures, inviting experience sharing, and directing patients to needed resources.

What's known as the chilling effect means immigrants are not using health services to which they are entitled. Clinicians and students can act to help safeguard immigrants’ rights.

This graphic storybook portrays an undocumented child in the United States who is denied fundamental human rights to health care, education, shelter, and food.

Four paintings capture unaccompanied children’s experiences of love, loss, and hope during their migration to the United States.

Many pregnant undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance covering prenatal care. National and state policies can either help or hinder patients’ access to health care that is universally recommended by professional guidelines.

Caring for undocumented immigrants, refugees, and asylees requires knowledge of the challenges and barriers to care those patients face. Clinicians should be prepared to help patients address immigration-related fears and anxieties that can profoundly affect their health.

US immigration policy contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which all United Nations member nations have ratified except the United States. The convention recognizes that children need special assistance and legal protection and prohibits deprivation of liberty.

Being undocumented is a risk factor for mental illness, and immigration status relates prominently to overall health. That’s enough to consider it protected health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule.

Presenting all, including expensive, options to all patients means advocating not only for individual patients, but also for a just health care system.

AMA policy offers guidance about physicians’ duties to provide care and advocate for undocumented patients.