At Channing House, a senior living community outside Stanford, an 88-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease kept asking staff what happened to his caregiver. Nobody would tell him.
Eventually he understood on his own: she was gone. Her DACA renewal was caught in a bureaucratic freeze the Trump administration engineered on purpose.
That’s not immigration enforcement. That’s due process denied by delay.
I spent 35 years in law enforcement. I know the difference between a system that holds people accountable through fair process and one that punishes people by simply refusing to act. What’s happening to America’s elder-care workforce right now is the latter — and it’s happening to people who have worked legally in this country for years, some for decades, with our government’s full knowledge and prior approval.
Nearly 70 million Americans are 65 or older. Roughly seven in 10 will need long-term care at some point in their lives. At the same time, the administration has slow-walked DACA renewals from a matter of weeks to a matter of months, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Temporary Protected Status has stripped protections from 350,000 Haitian and Syrian nationals — with more than a million additional TPS holders now exposed.
This is not a border security policy. This is a workforce-destruction policy, and the people being destroyed are the ones bathing, feeding, medicating and lifting our parents and grandparents out of bed every single day.
Nursing homes are already reimbursed by Medicaid at roughly 82 cents for every dollar spent per resident — a structural shortfall that leaves no room to raise wages and backfill losses. More than half of the nation’s nursing homes have already turned away residents for lack of staff. Layer a manufactured immigration crisis on top of an industry already this fragile, and you don’t get “enforcement.” You get abandoned elders and broken promises to families who trusted these facilities with their loved ones’ final years.
I’ve spent years documenting what happens when institutions abandon due process — wrongful detentions, unaccountable use of force, oversight bodies that exist on paper but not in practice. What’s happening to DACA and TPS holders right now follows the same pattern: not a hearing, not an individualized finding of wrongdoing, just an administrative clock quietly running out on people who did everything the system asked of them.
One caregiver at Channing House, who has managed the dining program for two decades, told residents she wasn’t asking for special treatment — only the chance to keep working. That’s not an unreasonable request. That’s the bare minimum decency owed to someone who has fed, cared for and shown up for our elders for twenty years.
San Diego is not immune from this. We have our own aging population, our own senior-care workforce built substantially on immigrant labor, and our own local leaders who have stayed conspicuously quiet while a policy engineered in Washington guts the caregiving infrastructure our parents and grandparents depend on.
Elected officials, healthcare executives, and law enforcement leaders who understand exactly what due process means — because they invoke it constantly when it protects institutions — owe the public an explanation for why they say nothing when it’s a caregiver about to lose her job of two decades instead.
Immigrants built the railroads, the dams and the food supply chains this country still runs on. They are, right now, the reason millions of American elders are fed, bathed and kept alive with dignity. A government that claims to respect the rule of law cannot simultaneously abandon the rule of process for the people doing that work.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
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