This Labor Day, South Florida healthcare workers face funding cuts and ICE raids | Opinion

This Labor Day 2025, South Florida healthcare workers and our communities who depend on them face a treacherous storm of massively slashed funding and menacing immigration tactics that will impact thousands of jobs and the delivery of critical care across the state.

With such deep threats in front of them, caregivers and all working people must stand together like the trailblazing labor leaders who inspired this holiday and make audacious demands of their own.

The dangerous funding cuts are part of the recent “big ugly bill” pushed by the White House and passed by GOP majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, stripping about $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next 10 years.

Nationally, it’s estimated that 16 million people will lose health coverage because of the cuts and the bill’s failure to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credit.

Florida, and South Florida especially, will be hit the hardest due to this area’s reliance — the highest in the nation — on these essential programs.

The cuts will hurt our most vulnerable Floridians including children, veterans, the disabled and seniors. Care for about four in seven residents of Florida nursing homes is supported by Medicaid.

Due to this legislation, our public safety net hospital Jackson Memorial anticipates losing $100 million annually that would otherwise cover services to patients and salaries for those providing care.

It’s clearly not “beautiful” that patients will lose care, caregivers will lose jobs and people will die.

Combine the damage of funding cuts with the chaos of ICE raids and other cruel Trump administration immigration policies, and we have the perfectly bad storm for our healthcare system in South Florida.

A substantial portion of area hospital and especially nursing home workers are immigrants. They have come to work hard, support their families and provide compassion and care to our loved ones.

Thousands of these committed caregivers soon will be losing their TPS status and employment eligibility. So many others, even with all the necessary paperwork to reside and hold jobs here, are showing up to work in fear of being swept up in a “zip-tie first, ask questions later” ICE raid.

Recently, in just one Miami nursing home that serves about 100 patients, 30 caregivers were let go by their employer due to immigration issues and intimidation.

We already have been suffering a critical healthcare staffing shortage since the COVID-19 pandemic, so who will be left to care for our communities when the funding and job cuts truly hit and the immigration purge intensifies?

The fact that the colossal healthcare cuts and misery coming to our communities is largely to pay for even more massive tax breaks for billionaires is especially appalling to our 1199SEIU healthcare union members.

The Trump administration seems to believe healthcare is minimum wage work, that workers need to hold three jobs to pay their bills and work until they’re 80 to survive. That’s why healthcare workers are loudly speaking out.

We are calling on the White House and Congress to reverse the deadly cuts to Medicaid. Politicians passed this ghastly bill; they can create a truly good one with meaningful protections for workers and communities.

We boldly demand Medicaid expansion and healthcare for all; for corporations to raise pay and stop exploitation; proper investments in schools, housing, Social Security and public health; universal worker rights to organize and bargain collectively; billionaires taxed their fair share so they give back what they’ve taken from the rest of us, and more.

Labor Day commemorates the audacity and determination of working people before us who fought exploitation and peril.

Today, for the well-being of our families and communities put in harm’s way by a dual front of healthcare cuts and immigration attacks, workers must unite and unleash a powerful storm of our own.

Roxey Nelson is executive vice president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest union of hospital and nursing home caregivers in Florida.