Immigrant patients who stay will face deportation
Federal agencies clarify plans for ending deferral program
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AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF CONFUSION and mixed messages between federal agencies over responsibility for oversight of a controversial immigration policy change, the two agencies confirmed Friday that the government is ending a program that allowed undocumented immigrants with serious medical conditions to remain in the country to receive treatment.
On Monday, attorneys for 20 immigrant families in Massachusetts said their clients had received notice to leave the country within 33 days, despite a member of their family having a serious medical condition. Those receiving the letters included families with children suffering from cancer, cystic fibrosis, and congenital heart conditions.
In letters, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, announced it had decided to terminate a program called “medical deferred action,” which allowed immigrants with serious medical conditions to remain in the US for treatment.
The Citizenship and Immigration Services said these immigrants, who do not have legal status in the US, would be dealt with by the enforcement arm of Homeland Security, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. But ICE said earlier this week that it had not been made aware of the action, and had no program to implement the policy change.
The move, the latest action by the Trump administration to clamp down on immigration, has drawn widespread condemnation from advocates and Democratic members of Congress, including Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
Immigrant families receiving care in Massachusetts, California, Florida, Minnesota, and New York have gone public with their stories, with some equating returning to their home countries, where proper care is often not available, to a death sentence.
The Citizenship and Immigration Services agency hadn’t previously offered a reason to why the medical deferment program was being terminated, but today said it has stopped granting those requests to “focus agency resources on administering the country’s lawful immigration system.”
This will not impact DACA recipients — young immigrants who were brought to the US illegally but have been protected by an Obama-era federal program currently tied up in courts.
About 1,000 people a year applied for the protected medical status before its cancellation, many for multiple years due to the complexity of the conditions being treated here. Under the policy change, all pending requests, or those that existed before Citizenship and Immigration Services began sending the letters on August 7, will be denied.
Immigrants will be required to depart voluntarily, or they will be unlawfully present in the US. While there are no plans for Citizenship and Immigration Services to hand over a list to ICE, the change in benefits will be noted in the individuals’ records, which ICE is able to access.
“The whole thing is a charade and total nonsense,” said Mahsa Khanbabai, New England chair for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. She has four clients, including three children, who received the letters last week, some already partway through the 33-day period. The letters were not sent by certified mail.
“They’re overwhelmed,” Khanbabai said of the girl’s family, which also has an 11-year-old daughter. “The girls are supposed to start school next week and now they have to worry they and their parents are going to be put into deportation proceedings, and not get the lifesaving care their daughter is receiving.”
Khanbabai said that she has heard of at least 40 individuals that have received letters ordering voluntary removal within 33 days so far.
A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Warren, Markey, and Pressley, announced Friday a congressional investigation into elimination of medical deferred action. In a letter to leaders at the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies, the group wrote, “This policy change is unfair to families who followed longstanding USCIS procedures requesting deferred action, only to discover in a denial letters those policies have changed.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform also announced it will hold a hearing on medical deferred action on September 6.