Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
Advisor(s)
Jay Sibara
Second Advisor
Nicole Denier
Abstract
The U.S. immigration regime produces the conditions that deny immigrants equitable access to healthcare. The Trump administration’s second term, characterized by aggressive immigration enforcement and anti-immigrant rhetoric, continued to intensify these conditions, contributing to a widespread decline in healthcare utilization by immigrant patients throughout the United States. This thesis investigates how policies and rhetoric from the Trump Administration, including immigration enforcement, shape the barriers that immigrants with and without status encounter when accessing healthcare services in Maine, and how the fear of surveillance, detention, or deportation influences how immigrant communities perceive and utilize healthcare services. Two in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with healthcare workers serving immigrant communities in the wake of the January 2026 immigration enforcement surge in Portland, Maine. The interviews were coded for recurring ideas and experiences across both transcripts, which revealed four broader categories: documentation status and the impact of the legal system, surveillance and insecurity, debilitation, and the navigation and positionality of healthcare workers. The self-reinforcing cycle of racialized “illegality,” surveillance and insecurity, and debilitation produces the conditions that extend beyond immigrants without status to U.S.-born citizens, mixed-status families, and healthcare infrastructure. Under the Trump administration, these forces have become so entrenched that they mutually reinforce each other, concealing the construction of racialized “illegality” and making this cycle increasingly self-sustaining. Reforms aimed at addressing the barriers immigrants and broader communities face must challenge each interlocking barrier at every scale to dismantle this self-reinforcing cycle, as partial reform would leave the cycle intact.
Keywords
Healthcare access, immigration regime, racialized "illegality, " surveillance, insecurity, debilitation
Recommended Citation
Masetti, Kathryn F., "A Regime of Fear: Barriers to Healthcare Access in Times of Intensifying Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and Immigration Enforcement" (2026). Honors Theses. Paper 1543.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1543