The Minister of Health, May Chomali, has distanced herself from the proposal by the Government of José Antonio Kast that seeks for some public institutions, including educational and healthcare centers, to provide information to authorities about irregular migrants with expulsion orders. “We are looking at it with quite a bit of concern,” she said this Friday to Radio 13C.
Read more Louisiana Primary Elections 2026: When They Are, How to Vote, and What’s at Stake
The legislative indication was presented by the Undersecretary of the Interior, Máximo Pávez, this week during a session of the Senate Government, Decentralization and Regionalization commission where modifications to the migration law were discussed so that clandestine entry into Chile changes from being an administrative offense to becoming a crime. The initiative was supported by President Kast who, on Thursday, argued: “The only way to organize is to know who uses the different public services.”
But the proposal did not generate consensus within his own Government. The Minister of Public Security, Trinidad Steinert, said this morning, in an interview on Radio Agricultura, that “everything helps, of course everything helps, so it is welcome.” Meanwhile, Chomali warned that the Health Ministry could not report these patients, since these people provide their data “in the context of healthcare, and that is protected by the health code and by the law of patients’ rights and duties, and we will absolutely defend that.”
According to the legislative indication pushed by Kast, “every organ of the State Administration, institution or social security or public or private health organization, or public or private educational establishment, will be obliged to provide the migratory administrative and oversight authority with the information they require, including address, contact phone, email and other relevant data regarding foreigners who are subject to ongoing migratory procedures.”
Pávez, in a conversation with T13 Radio this Friday, however, said that the Government is promoting that only when an expulsion process is verified the authority may “officially, confidentially, contact any State, social security, public and private education institutions to see if they have any data on the person to make the respective notifications.” That is, unlike what the bill says, which uses the word “obligation,” Pávez denied that there is an obligation to report or denounce. “That is not so, it never has been, it is not in the text and I declare myself surprised that this is the reading that has been established,” said the undersecretary, who reiterated that they needed to apply the principle of interoperability to be able to carry out expulsions because some people change address or evade the actions of migration authorities.
Later, the undersecretary, at a press conference, insisted that there was a misunderstanding and that all constitutional guarantees were intended to be safeguarded: “What it does is that, when we require information to be able to carry out a migratory sanction or expulsion procedure, we can have a document, a piece of data, just as the President said, to locate the people. That’s all.”
The main rejections to the indication have come from the Chilean health sector, where the right-wing Administration’s intention has been questioned across the board. Carlos Becerra, national treasurer of the Medical College (Colmed), said he was concerned because providing data about patients violates professional secrecy and “imposes a certain distrust and supervisory role” on health personnel. “This breaches several international agreements where health should not be subject to any consideration, since it is recognized as a human right,” said the union spokesperson.
The idea was also criticized by doctor Izkia Siches, former Minister of the Interior of Gabriel Boric’s Government (2022-2026) and former president of Colmed: “Turning hospitals into spaces of fear is a risk to public health.” Jaime Mañalich, former Minister of Health of Sebastián Piñera’s Government (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), wrote in a column in The Clinic that applying this initiative “would be a serious mistake” because “it would not only empty the right to health of content, but would turn the clinic into a trap, driving sick people away from the system with public health consequences for the entire population” and that “contagious diseases do not respect migratory status.”
