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Posts tagged immigration reform
Mexican Teenager Shot Dead on Mexican Soil by US Border Agent
US authorities have said fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Güereca was part of a group of boys throwing rocks at Border Patrol agents who were trying to detain two people at the border crossing. But a cell-phone video obtained by the Spanish language network Univision shows otherwise. The grainy footage shows the Border Patrol agent detaining one man at gunpoint. While he has the man on the ground, he points his gun toward a second person on the Mexican side of the border. The video shows that person running away as the agent fires several shots. The video then shows a body next to a column under the bridge. We speak to Fernando Garcia, the director of the Border Network for Human Rights. [includes rush transcript]
Dying Immigrant Denied Kidney Transplant Because He Is Undocumented
By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jan 31, 2012 at 1:00 pm
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/31/415387/undocumented-immigrant-organ-transplant/?mobile=nc
Jesus Navarro, a dialysis patient who will die without a kidney transplant, has private insurance. He has a donor to provide the needed kidney. But because he is an undocumented immigrant, hospital administrators at UC San Francisco Medical Center are refusing to allow the procedure, saying that there is no guarantee Navarro will receive the necessary follow-up care because of his immigration status. Now, Navarro is stuck in an “ethical gray area” for the hospital. “It puts the doctors in a very awkward and torn position,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “You come into this trying to do good and find yourself stuck in the middle of a fight about immigration.”
For eight years, Navarro has used a home dialysis machine to cleanse his blood after his kidneys began to fail. He reached the top of the waitlist for a kidney in the spring, but doctors called off his transplant when they discovered his immigration status. Even after his wife offered her kidney for the transplant, administrators still refused to allow the surgery. Reece Fawley, executive director of transplantation at UC San Francisco, said in a statement that the hospital considers socioeconomic stability for all patients, including immigration status.
Navarro’s situation highlights a dilemma for hospitals when it comes to organ transplants for immigrants, especially if their undocumented status threatens their continued access to insurance:
Though no data are available, anecdotal evidence suggests clinics sometimes perform organ transplants on illegal immigrants, especially when the patients are young. In one high-profile case, UCLA Medical Center gave an undocumented woman three liver transplants before she turned 21.
But health administrators also reject patients because of their immigration status, though that usually happens when the patients lack insurance. Bellevue Hospital in New York attracted attention last year when it refused to transplant a kidney between brothers because they could not pay for the operation. […]
Some bioethicists say the hospital should have performed the surgery because Navarro would not be taking resources away from other patients or putting his wife at serious risk.
After all, many legal residents fail to follow their post-surgical plan.
Some lawmakers would even want hospitals to check the immigration status for all patients. The Arizona legislature considered a bill that would require that, and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said in November that it would not be going “too far” to have hospitals ask patients about their immigration status.
But in the meantime, Navarro’s private insurance from his job would cover the transplant and follow-up care, but he lost job last month after an immigration audit and his insurance could run out. If he is unable to extend his insurance and ends up in California’s Medi-Cal program, his problem would worsen because Medi-Cal would not cover the immunosuppressive drugs that prevent organ rejection after a transplant. “We don’t know what to do,” his wife said. “It’s like we’re on a ledge - we can’t go here or there.”
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David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
BATON ROUGE — A Los Angeles federal judge has ruled that the conditions that Filipino teachers were subjected to when brought to Louisiana qualifies their case to be heard under the federal human trafficking law.
According to DailyWorld.com, US District Judge John A. Kronstadt’s ruling is the first time the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) would be applied to a class of people, instead of individuals.
The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center filed the lawsuit, on behalf of Filipino teachers, against the East Baton Rouge Parish Board (EBRSB), primarily the superintendent’s office.
Also involved are the companies the school board worked with, based in Manila and Los Angeles. An official in the EBRSB superintendent’s office facilitated the importation of teachers and conducted interviews in Manila.
LOS ANGELES—Assistant Senate Majority Leader Richard Durbin has cited the case of undocumented Filipino Jose Librojo in the US Senate to convince his fellow senators to support an immigration reform bill that he had cosponsored.
“Because of our broken immigration laws, Jose has been placed in deportation proceedings” said Durbin, who held up a poster-size photo of Librojo as he spoke on the Senate floor on December 12.
“All these years, 16 years in America… a man who is currently working in the health field, in dentistry, who’s done such a good job his employer wants to have him here permanently, is now facing the prospect of being deported to a country he cannot even remember,” Durbin said.
Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip and an ally of President Barack Obama, has been pushing for passage of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (Dream) Act, which would create a path to citizenship for undocumented people in the United States.
The act seeks to provide conditional permanent residency to undocumented immigrants of good moral character who arrived in America as minors, graduated from US high schools and lived in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment.
Librojo received a deportation order from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) two months ago.
Thousands of supporters, led by Librojo’s friends and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (Nafcon), launched online petitions and an e-mail campaign to halt his deportation. Word of the case reached Durbin, who interceded for Librojo. ICE suspended Librojo’s deportation for one year to give him a chance to legalize his stay.
A report released Monday by two Chicago-based human rights groups calls for the Obama administration to close three immigrant detention facilities they accuse of having the most egregious violations, two of which are in Illinois.
Titled “Not Too Late For Reform,” the report was authored jointly by Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR) and examines Midwestern county jails holding immigrants.
At a time when the administration is planning to open more large-scale detention facilities nationwide, the report spotlights three county jails currently housing immigrants they classify as the worst in the Midwest: Jefferson County Jail in Mt. Vernon, Ill., Tri-County Detention Center in Ullin, Ill. and Boone County Jail in Burlington, Ky. In the report, the agencies call for these and other detention centers with frequent observed violations to be shut down.
The NIJC and MCHR are also asking for changes in immigration policy prioritizing alternatives to detention, particularly for “low-risk” individuals without criminal histories.
Officials with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement were sent copies of the report last week, Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the justice center, told the Associated Press.
In their midwestern case study, the agencies found that many detained immigrants—50 percent at Boone and 40 percent at Tri-State—had not committed a crime or had committed only minor offenses, according to the report. ICE claims to exercise prosecutorial discretion in such “low-priority” cases, but in many instances the study found individuals suffering from medical and mental health issues, for whom incarceration is generally considered inappropriate, still end up behind bars.
Once incarcerated, the NIJC and MCHR report that immigrants face the most egregious human rights violations, isolated from communication with their families and access to legal counsel. Language barriers are often not addressed, and many immigrants are misinformed of their rights and obligations. Overcrowding can lead to problems maintaining ICE’s National Detention Standards, which entitle detainees to medical services, at least two hot meals a day, and clean clothing and living conditions.
“Within one day of my arrival at Boone, I told the nurse that I am HIV-positive,” one detainee told NIJC. “She said that she would call the clinic to obtain my medical history…almost six weeks have passed and I have never received any medication.”
Furthermore, the report alleges that jails sanctioned by the Department of Homeland Security as being “deficient” against these standards, including Jefferson County, still often see their contracts renewed with ICE.
The study’s findings were based on nearly 1,600 legal intakes and interviews over 21 visits to the evaluated facilities. The proposed action plan calls for a freeze on planned expansions, closure of facilities with frequent observed violations, and stronger protections paired with aggressive oversight measures to prevent further unchecked abuses.
“When you have no one watching or involved from the outside, it creates an environment when people are vulnerable to abuse and neglect,” McCarthy told the AP.
