Visa Lawyer Blog

A ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel, has temporarily enjoined three provisions of South Carolina Act 69 and found a fourth provision likely to be overturned in future proceedings. The ruling makes South Carolina the sixth state—after Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Utah, and Alabama—to see major parts of a punitive immigration law blocked in federal court.

Following its enactment last June, South Carolina Act 69 was challenged in court by both the federal government and a coalition of civil rights groups. In a 42-page opinion, Judge Gergel entered temporary injunctions against the following provisions, finding each to be preempted by federal immigration law:

Section 4, which makes it a state crime to transport or harbor undocumented immigrants, or for undocumented immigrants to allow themselves to be transported or harbored.

A recent New York Times article highlights the fine line between medical care for individuals that need it and the difficulties that come because of immigration status. The story talks about an illegal immigrant from Mexico living in New York City whose kidneys are failing. His siblings are donors, but the cost of the surgery requires the need for surgery. The man was a waiter in his early 30s, a husband and father of two, so well liked at the Manhattan restaurant where he had worked for a decade that everyone from the customers to the dishwasher was donating money to help his family.

When his younger brother volunteered to donate a kidney to restore him to normal life, they encountered a health care paradox: the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 a year, but not for the $100,000 transplant that would make it unnecessary.

For nearly two years, the brothers and their supporters have been hunting for a way to make the transplant happen. Their journey has taken them through a maze of conflicting laws, private insurance conundrums and ethical quandaries, back to the national impasse between health care and immigration policies.

Doctors sought a transplant center that would take him. Hospitals in the city receive millions of taxpayer dollars to help offset care for illegal immigrants and other uninsured patients. But at one hospital, administrators apparently overruled surgeons willing to waive their fees. At another, he was told to come back when he had legal status or $200,000.

A last resort is a return to Mexico, where the operation costs about $40,000. But to pay off the necessary loans, the and his brother, a deli worker, would have to sneak back in through the desert. If they failed, they would be cut off from their children in Brooklyn, who are United States citizens.

Bellevue performs no transplants but, as a trauma center, often supplies organs harvested, with family consent, from illegal immigrants fatally injured at work.

“Here’s the paradox: he could donate, but he can’t receive,” Dr. Manheimer said, calling the imbalance troubling. Organ registries do not record illegal status, but a study estimated that over a 20-year period noncitizens donated 2.5 percent of organs and received fewer than 1 percent.

To those focusing on immigration enforcement, however, the inequity runs the other way. “They should not get any benefit from breaking the law, especially something as expensive as organ transplants or dialysis,” said Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who contends that care for illegal immigrants is bankrupting American health care and has sought to require that emergency rooms report stabilized patients for deportation unless they prove citizenship or legal residence.

“If they’re dead, I don’t have an objection to their organs being used,” Mr. Rohrabacher added. “If they’re alive, they shouldn’t be here no matter what.”
To Ruth Faden, the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the brothers’ case, like the transplant statistics, illustrates how quickly firm principles on both sides unravel in practice. “We tie ourselves up in knots,” she said, “because we’ve accepted as a country and in international human rights law that if someone shows up in extremis in your emergency room, the nurses and doctors and technicians are morally obligated, and legally obligated, to provide that life-saving care.”
How to begin refusing care, she added, becomes a dilemma for “real people in real time.”
This dilemma shows just how personal and difficult it is where the line in providing health care for those in need gets mired by the legal situations a person is in. Balancing the humanitarian side of medicine with the rule of law has become a focal point in a discussion where those that want reform on the immigration enforcement side appear unfeeling towards the plight of illegal immigrants who’s suffering have an impact on U.S. citizen children. The other side is that those who appear soft on immigration enforcement minimize the other concerns regarding the costs that come with trying to increase the enforcement and how it is a drain of taxpayer resources.

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U.S. citizens have been illegally detained throughout Los Angeles County as a result of the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program, a coalition of civil and immigrant rights groups said Wednesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union and others identified four U.S. citizens detained through the fingerprint-sharing program in the last few months, including three identified in November.

“Native-born American citizens are being illegally detained by the Secure Communities program right here in L.A. County,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Arizona may impose tough anti-immigration measures. Among them, in a law enacted last year, is a requirement that the police there question people they stop about their immigration status.

The Obama administration challenged parts of the law in court, saying that it could not be reconciled with federal immigration laws and policies under the Supremacy Clause. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, blocked enforcement of parts of the law in April.

The administration challenged four provisions. The most prominent was a requirement that state law enforcement officials determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if officials have reason to believe that the individual might be an illegal immigrant. The provision also requires that the immigration status of people who are arrested be determined before they are released.