“We bear witness, we organize, and we refuse to look away”: Dr. Chanelle Diaz accepts the 2026 Bernard Lown Award

Chanelle Diaz, MD, MPH, received the 2026 Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility for her outstanding leadership in advancing the health and dignity of those held in immigration detention through pro bono forensic medical evaluations, groundbreaking research, outspoken public advocacy, and a commitment to cultivating the next generation of socially responsible clinicians. (press release)

Dr. Diaz is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and internal medicine medical director at the Charles Rangel Community Health Center. She is also the medical director for the Adult Community Health Worker Program at NewYork-Presbyterian’s Center for Community Health Navigation. Dr. Diaz volunteers for the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network and serves as a steering committee member and medical evaluator for the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest Medical Providers Network.

Watch her acceptance of the Bernard Lown Award and read excerpts from her speech below.

The remarks of Dr. Chanelle Diaz

The following are excerpts from Dr. Chanelle Diaz’ remarks at the Bernard Lown Award ceremony May 21, 2026.

I want to thank the Lown Institute and Dr. Saini for this recognition, and for the Institute’s unwavering commitment to the kind of medicine Dr. Lown believed in. 

I am incredibly honored to receive this award for the work that is closest to my heart, work that fueled by love and rage exposes the human suffering and health crises unfolding inside U.S. immigration prisons. James Baldwin once said, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

We are collectively witnessing the disappearance of friends and neighbors, the erosion of voting rights and democratic norms, the dismantling of public health protections, and the abandonment of families in their moments of greatest need. Beneath all of this is a deeper crisis: the normalization of human suffering and indifference. 

“At a time when immigrant prisons are expanding, we must confront the structural violence of detention as a medical and moral emergency.”

Immigration violations are civil, like a parking ticket. An immigration hearing should never result in a death sentence. Yet every six days, immigration detention takes another life. 2025 was the deadliest year in decades for people in ICE custody, and 2026 is on track to surpass it. These deaths are the predictable result of policy choices and they are preventable. At a time when immigrant prisons are expanding, we must confront the structural violence of detention as a medical and moral emergency.

I soon realized that as a physician I was granted access that few others had to closed facilities to witness and document what was happening to people inside. I was able to spend hours listening to people describe being trapped in a state of limbo with unlivable conditions, untreated pain, inadequate care, and intense isolation. It became clear to me that detention didn’t just strip them of their belongings, it also stripped them of their humanity. Each evaluation I did was an opportunity to challenge that.

“It became clear to me that detention didn’t just strip them of their belongings, it also stripped them of their humanity. Each evaluation I did was an opportunity to challenge that.”

As a primary care physician caring for a predominantly immigrant community, I witness the harms of immigration enforcement policies every day in the exam room. I have sat with a mother who broke down in tears when we uncovered the source of her anxiety: while trying to hold it together for her children emotionally, she was also quietly making plans for their care in case she was taken by ICE. 

Alongside conversations about diabetes and blood pressure medications, I now find myself counseling patients on how to recognize the signs of a stroke in the event they are detained and denied access to their medications. These are heart wrenching conversations to have. I can treat diabetes and high blood pressure, but treating fear requires much more than prescriptions.

The reality is that the current political climate is impeding our ability to practice evidence-based medicine on multiple fronts. For too long we’ve accepted an unequal healthcare system that values some lives more than others. Confronting the structural violence of healthcare in America is quite literally breaking our healthcare workers. So, I’ve found myself wondering, what is the role of the doctor without the ability to heal?

The answer is, we bear witness, we organize, and we refuse to look away. Every act of collective care that keeps someone out of detention, every coalition that prevents deportation, every story that breaks public silence chips away at the system’s legitimacy and necessity. In this moment of growing dehumanization, we have both the responsibility and the power to act collectively, to document the clinical consequences of policy, to accompany patients through fear, and to advocate for a healthcare system and country that recognizes our shared humanity.

“What is the role of the doctor without the ability to heal? The answer is, we bear witness, we organize, and we refuse to look away.”

Our current immigration policies reflect how the lives of immigrants, and particularly immigrants of color, are valued less than the lives of others, BUT we have the power to counter this in the exam room by seeing our patients fully, centering their humanity, and creating space for justice.

As necessary as presence in the exam room is, it will never be enough to dismantle what was built to exclude. Audre Lorde reminds us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, and what we are witnessing is exactly what those tools were designed to produce. Doing the impossible requires a radical reimagining grounded in community, care, and justice — a world without ICE where people can pursue their immigration case within their communities, free of cages, a future where immigration status no longer determines one’s health or worth.

“We don’t fight because we know we can win. We fight because there is too much to lose if we don’t try.”

I want to close by thanking my family for their love and support, today and every day, and my colleagues across the country who are fighting for their patients and the communities they serve. None of this work can be done alone. And thank you all for taking this next step with me.