A silent protest staged earlier this month outside of Boston Medical Center drew hundreds of BMC employees, as doctors, nurses and other health care providers scrawled messages on white lab coats and held posters that said things like, "More hospitals, less cages."

Boston-area health care providers are increasingly finding themselves in the middle of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration. New policy proposals and partisan politics are combining, making it more difficult for immigrant patients to access health care and in turn, leading more physicians to push back.

The BMC demonstration was organized in protest of a visit from first lady Melania Trump.

"We're here standing in solidarity with our patient population and the communities in which we work here in Boston to show that we are not complicit in the fact that our organization was invited to have the Trump administration here," said Erica Pike, a program manager at BMC who stood alongside her colleagues.

The first lady was visiting a program for infants born with opioid dependencies, but several BMC workers at the protest worried her visit sent the wrong message to the very patient population BMC serves — namely nonwhite and immigrant communities.

Sarah Kimball is a primary care physician and the co-director of the Immigrant and Refugee Health Program at BMC, which is the area's largest safety net hospital, which means it treats patients regardless of insurance coverage or ability to pay.

"Every day in my clinic, I see how the current political climate toward immigrants has dire health consequences," Kimball said. "I mean, our patients are really living with the effects of politics in their minds and in their bodies, and that's certainly something that we've seen ramped up in the last few years."

The Massachusetts Medical Society adopted a resolution last year focusing on access to health care for immigrants. The measure encourages providers to oppose the presence of immigration enforcement at health care facilities -- a common fear that can lead immigrants to skip appointments or avoid scheduling them altogether.

Health care facilities are recognized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as sensitive locations, which means the agency generally avoids making arrests on site. But there are no laws that actually prevent the agency from doing so.