Medicaid cuts and immigration crackdown threaten nursing home safety and staff : Shots

Jackline Conteh, one of many African-born caregivers at the Goodwin House Alexandria nursing home, cares for the Rev. Donald Goodness, 92. Nursing homes are subject to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids under the Trump administration.

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In a top-rated nursing home in Alexandria, Va., the Rev. Donald Goodness is cared for by nurses and aides from various parts of Africa. One of them, Jackline Conteh, a naturalized U.S. citizen and nurse assistant from Sierra Leone, bathes and helps dress him most days and vigilantly intercepts any meal headed his way that contains gluten, as Goodness has celiac disease.

“We are full of people who come from other countries,” Goodness, 92, said about Goodwin House Alexandria’s staff. Without them, the retired Episcopal priest said, “I would be, and my building would be, desolate.”

“Nearly every one of us from Africa, we know how to care for older adults,” says Jackline Conteh, a certified nursing assistant from Sierra Leone. She stands with the Rev. Donald Goodness.

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The long-term health care industry is facing a double whammy from President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants and the Republican Party’s proposals to reduce Medicaid spending. The industry is highly dependent on foreign workers: More than 800,000 immigrants and naturalized citizens comprise 28% of direct care employees at home care agencies, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other long-term care companies.

But in January, the Trump administration rescinded former President Joe Biden’s 2021 policy that protected health care facilities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The administration’s broad immigration crackdown threatens to drastically reduce the number of current and future workers for the industry. “People may be here on a green card, and they are afraid ICE is going to show up,” said Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofits that care for older adults.

A collision of policies

Staffing shortages and quality-of-care problems would be compounded by other policies pushed by Trump and the Republican-led Congress, according to nursing home officials, resident advocates and academic experts. Federal spending cuts under negotiation may strip nursing homes of some of their largest revenue sources by limiting ways states leverage Medicaid money and by making it harder for new nursing home residents to retroactively qualify for Medicaid. Care for 6 in 10 residents is paid for by Medicaid, the state-federal health program for poor or disabled Americans.

“We are facing the collision of two policies here that could further erode staffing in nursing homes and present health outcome challenges,” said Eric Roberts, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The industry hasn’t recovered from COVID-19, which killed more than 200,000 long-term care facility residents and workers and led to massive staff attrition and turnover. Nursing homes have struggled to replace licensed nurses, who can find better-paying jobs at hospitals and doctors’ offices, as well as nursing assistants, who can earn more working at big-box stores or fast-food joints. Quality issues that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic have expanded: The percentage of nursing homes that federal health inspectors cited for putting residents in jeopardy of immediate harm or death has risen alarmingly from 17% in 2015 to 28% in 2024.

In addition to seeking to reduce Medicaid spending, congressional Republicans have proposed shelving the biggest nursing home reform in decades: a Biden-era rule mandating minimum staffing levels that would require most of the United States’ nearly 15,000 nursing homes to hire more workers.

The long-term care industry expects demand for direct care workers to burgeon with an influx of aging baby boomers needing professional care. The Census Bureau has projected that the number of people 65 or older will grow from 63 million this year to 82 million in 2050.

In an email, Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency “is committed to supporting a strong, stable long-term care workforce” and “continues to work with states and providers to ensure quality care for older adults and individuals with disabilities.” In a separate email, Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said foreigners wanting to work as caregivers “need to do that by coming here the legal way” but did not address the effect on the long-term care workforce of deportations of classes of authorized immigrants.

A commitment to the job

Goodwin Living, a faith-based nonprofit, runs three retirement communities in Northern Virginia for people who live independently, need a little assistance each day, have memory issues or require the availability of around-the-clock nurses. It also operates a retirement community in Washington, D.C. Medicare rates Goodwin House Alexandria as one of the best-staffed nursing homes in the country. Forty percent of the organization’s 1,450 employees are foreign-born and are either seeking citizenship or are already naturalized, according to Lindsay Hutter, a Goodwin spokesperson.

“As an employer, we see they stay on with us, they have longer tenure, they are more committed to the organization,” said Rob Liebreich, Goodwin’s president and CEO.

Jackline Conteh spent much of her youth shuttling between Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ghana to avoid wars and tribal conflicts. Her mother was killed by a stray bullet in her home country of Liberia, Conteh said. “She was sitting outside,” Conteh, 56, recalled in an interview.

Conteh was working as a nurse in a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2009 when she learned of a lottery for visas to come to the United States. She won, though she couldn’t afford to bring her husband and two children along at the time. After she got a nursing assistant certification, Goodwin hired her in 2012.

Conteh said taking care of elders is embedded in the culture of African families. When she was 9, she helped feed and dress her grandmother, a job that rotated among her and her sisters. She washed her father when he was dying of prostate cancer. Her husband joined her in the United States in 2017; she cares for him because he has heart failure.

“We know how to care for older adults,” she said.

Her daughter is now in the United States, while her son is still in Africa. Conteh said she sends money to him, her mother-in-law and one of her sisters.

Jackline Conteh helps Donald Goodness with his hair and other “activities of daily living,” as it is known in the care industry, at Goodwin House Alexandria in Virginia.

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In the nursing home where Goodness and 89 other residents live, Conteh helps with daily tasks like dressing and eating, checks residents’ skin for signs of swelling or sores, and tries to help them avoid falling or getting disoriented. Of 102 employees in the building, broken up into eight residential wings called “small houses” and a wing for memory care, at least 72 were born abroad, Hutter said.

“I start making friends with him”

Donald Goodness grew up in Rochester, N.Y., and spent 25 years as rector of the Church of the Ascension in New York City, retiring in 1997. He and his now-deceased wife moved to Alexandria to be closer to their daughter, and in 2011 they moved into independent living at Goodwin House. In 2023, he moved into one of the skilled nursing small houses, where Conteh started caring for him.

“I have a bad leg and I can’t stand on it very much, or I’d fall over,” he said. “She’s in there at 7:30 in the morning, and she helps me bathe.” Goodness said Conteh is exacting about cleanliness and will tell the housekeepers if his room is not kept properly.

Conteh said Goodness was withdrawn when he first arrived. “He don’t want to come out — he want to eat in his room,” she said. “He don’t want to be with the other people in the dining room, so I start making friends with him.”

She showed him a photo of Sierra Leone on her phone and told him of the weather there. He told her about his work at the church and how his wife did laundry for the choir. The breakthrough, she said, came one day when he agreed to lunch with her in the dining room. Long out of his shell, Goodness now sits on the community’s resident council and enjoys distributing the mail to other residents on his floor.

The Rev. Donald Goodness was rector of a New York City church before retiring. He still watches sermons through the church’s website.

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“The people that work in my building become so important to us,” Goodness said.

Revoked work permits

While Trump’s 2024 election campaign focused on foreigners in the U.S. without authorization, his administration has broadened the focus to target those legally in the U.S., including refugees who fled countries beset by wars or natural disasters. This month, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the work permits for migrants and refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who arrived under a Biden-era program.

“I’ve just spent my morning firing good, honest people because the federal government told us that we had to,” Rachel Blumberg, president of the Toby & Leon Cooperman Sinai Residences Boca Raton, a Florida retirement community, said in a video posted on LinkedIn. “I am so sick of people saying that we are deporting people because they are criminals. Let me tell you, they are not all criminals.”

At Goodwin House, Conteh is fearful for her fellow immigrants. Foreign workers at Goodwin rarely talk about their backgrounds. “They’re scared,” she said. “Nobody trusts anybody.” Her neighbors in her apartment complex fled the U.S. in December and returned to Sierra Leone after Trump won the election, leaving their children with relatives.

“If all these people leave the United States, they go back to Africa or to their various countries, what will become of our residents?” Conteh asked. “What will become of our old people that we’re taking care of?”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.