On February 3, thousands of New Yorkers gathered outside New York University (NYU) Langone’s Tisch Hospital in Manhattan to protest the hospital system’s decision to stop providing gender-affirming care for transgender youth — a decision that New York attorney general Tish James warned violates state antidiscrimination law. That same day, Crain’s reported that NYU Langone had warned staff not to protect undocumented patients from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), suggesting that it will require New York health care workers to collaborate with the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations.
NYU Langone’s rapid capitulation to Donald Trump should be disturbing: it means a critical part of New York City’s health care infrastructure will be hostile to trans and immigrant New Yorkers at the very moment when the federal government is coming after them. The system is gigantic, employing over 50,000 workers across six inpatient hospitals and three hundred outpatient facilities; its decisions on which patients deserve care and protection are a matter of enormous public concern. The health care workers who staff NYU’s facilities are dedicated professionals who want to keep their patients safe — but management is telling them they’re not allowed to.
It wouldn’t be the first time health care workers at NYU faced off against management over patient care. Just a year ago, an arbitrator sustained union nurses’ charge that the hospital system had violated the law by understaffing its Brooklyn campus.
No doubt NYU will plead poverty, arguing that the Trump administration’s threat to withdraw federal grants leaves it with little choice but to comply. That argument doesn’t hold water.
The hospital system reported $431 million in net income on $14.2 billion in revenue in 2024; its CEO, Robert Grossman, earned nearly $23 million in 2023 alone. Those figures are expected, given what NYU charges for care. The labor union…
Auteur: Zohran Mamdani
