Community activist groups say they’re frustrated with the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department’s process for crafting a plan to transfer patients with “unsatisfactory immigration status” to a different primary care provider.

In September, the county announced that patients with Medi-Cal who have an unsatisfactory immigration status would not be able to be seen at county health clinics because of federal and state funding changes. The announcement stated that patients would be transitioned to new primary care providers by Jan. 1.

However, the mandate is currently being blocked by a legal injunction.

County Public Health Director Mouhanad Hammami appeared in front of the county Board of Supervisors on Oct. 7 to explain the transfer plan for patients with UIS.

However, Central Coast Labor Council Executive Director Jeremy Goldberg, joined by 805 UndocuFund Executive Director Primitiva Hernandez, said he believed that county health officials had left community groups out of planning conversations and that the plan is being enacted too early.

“The fact that we found out about this intended policy change just a few days before it was to happen at the Board of Supervisors meeting with no kind of formal organized community input was a little frightening,” Goldberg said. 

He said that while county health officials might have good intent, without community input, there are overlooked consequences to the plan.

“Even if you have identified a new provider for every single patient and every single case and who they should move to, there’s trust that builds up over the years and just simply saying here’s another doctor you’re allowed to go to ignores that trust,” he said. 

Hammami confirmed that there had been no transfer of patients yet as of this week. 

Hernandez said she found out about the developing plan through local news stories and felt alarmed.

Hernandez said she and other community groups met with county health officials in September to review the plan, but she left the meeting with mixed feelings. 

“I applaud the county health decision to make a contingency plan that protects the immigrant patients in our community, but it is unnecessary,” she said.

Both community leaders said they believe that enacting the plan now would be far too soon. Hernandez compared it to an emergency plan in the face of a disaster.

“Do you start issuing evacuations when there is no disaster yet, when it’s just cloudy?” she said. 

Hernandez also accused county officials of quietly announcing their plans, citing a meeting in Santa Maria on Oct. 25. She felt that the meeting should have been elsewhere, not just to Santa Maria-based groups and people.

However, Hammami said that Tu Tiempo, a Santa Maria Spanish-language media outlet, and Together in Voice and Action hosted the meeting and asked them to speak — not the other way around. 

After the September meeting, community leaders turned to legal experts from the California Immigrant Policy Center and the National Health Law Program to discuss the legality surrounding the transferring of patients.

Together, they created a memo to present to the Board of Supervisors. The memo outlined that the legal injunction had strong footing, according to Josh Stehlik, policy director at California Immigrant Policy Center.

“To our knowledge, this would have been the first county in California to take this preemptive measure, essentially to pre-comply with a Trump administration notice that a federal court had found to be unlawful,” Stehlik said.

He said Trump’s notice in July mentioned that clinics would receive guidance over how to implement the change, but no guidance has been published.

However, Hammami said he is adamant that the plan needed to be developed ahead of time.

“If people want to call it premature, that’s fine,” Hammami said. “However, we call it preemptive and proactive rather than reactive.”

He acknowledged that Hernandez and Goldberg are coming from a place of passion and concern — a concern that he, too, shares.

“But if it is that they need to decide how we do care for our patients, then with all due respect, I don’t think they have the experience nor the background to do so,” he said.

He added that he believes people are using the plan as a political statement. 

“A lot of people are using this to say, ‘Why are you not standing against the Trump administration?’ ‘Why aren’t you using it to show a position or something?’” he said. “I don’t think we as County Health or Public Health have to be political. We serve everybody.”

Hernandez said she does see the matter as political, questioning how other counties that “are not as progressive and are more conservative” will perceive the transferring of immigrant patients. 

Overall, she said she wants the community to know that local groups worked hard behind the scenes. 

“As we look into the future, this coalition of labor, community and immigrant rights leaders wants to be a resource to county officials so that we can think creatively about how the county navigates multiple problems that will be coming down the pipeline and that we will have to face collectively as a community,” Hernandez said. 

Group leaders are hoping to meet with Hammami in the coming weeks to get a better understanding of each other’s perspectives, according to Goldberg. The meeting date has not been set.