Private Deportations

México del Norte
Jorge Mújica Murias
mexicodelnorte@yahoo.com.mx

Daily Deportations

It is not new. Every day, Barack Obama’s regime is getting rid of over 1,000 immigrants via its “Criminal Alien Removal Program”, its Polimigra program, workplace raids or in any other way.
And it is not me the one saying “any other way”, but the General Inspection Office of Homeland Security. In their latest report on the Polimigra program, the use of local authorities to enforce immigration law, the Office says that 28 of their 33 recommendations from a year ago to improve the program have not been followed. Neither Immigration nor local police departments are following true with the purpose of the program, and they are deporting simple and common folk, instead of “the worst,” the report quotes. To improve the practice, the Inspector’s Office slapped Immigration with new 16 recommendations to “ensure a better enforcement and accountability in their use of the money,” and mandated them to issue monthly reports on their compliance.
Partly, that happens because of cases like Bernardo Pastor expose Immigration’s failures. Bernardo, young undocumented immigrant brought here when he was three years old, got processed for deportation after a fender-bender. One of the typical “Dreamers”, Bernardo is a community volunteer, start of his soccer team and Homecoming King at Reading High School.
His detention and deportation case so outraged his schoolmates and teachers, who sent thousands of letters to congressmen and held marches and protests, one of them at Ohio’s States’ Capitol, until they got a deportation hold for a year.

Private Deportations

But Quelino Jiménez Ojeda did not have that luck. Nobody knew of his deportation until he was already in México. On December 21st, the Board of Advocate Christ Medical Centre in Oak Lawn, Illinois, decided to deport the 23 year old immigrant, privately.
Quelino has been hospitalized for five months, quadriplegic, alter a workplace related accident at the construction company he worked for. Poor as any Mexican from Oaxaca working in construction in the United States, neither Quelino nor his family could afford the cost of his treatment. To save on his costly expenses, and effectively end his spinal cord lesion which “may never cure him, anyway” Advocate Christ hired a private company and put Quelino in an airplane to México. Immigration was not even consulted.
Advocate Christ says his legal guardian authorized the “transfer.” She and her lawyer deny it. Today, Quelino is in his native Oaxaca, according to immigration advocates. His family lives 10 hours away from the nearest hospital. They are Chinateco Indians who speak little Spanish.
The Mexican Protection Consul in Chicago is with him, trying to figure out what to do in his case. Between Advocate Christ and the private company they hires to deport Quelino, they at least committed kidnapping, several violations of the civil Rights of a patient with disabilities, forceful, unwilling and unauthorized removal of a person to another country and who knows how many other human, civil and federal crimes.
And this is not the first case, and it will not be the last one if we don’t stop them. Back in July of 2003, Luis Alberto Jiménez, in Florida, also a quadriplegic patient was deported to his native Guatemala after three years of an auto accident. The Martin Memorial Medical Center, said the Administrative Board, had spent over a million dollars in that period, and they decided to better spend 30 thousand dollars to send him home.
His cousin Montejo Gaspar brought up a law suit, which he lost when the jury ruled that the hospital was right. A later appeal, in 2009, was won when the judge decided that local juries can’t have jurisdiction over immigration matters, and that Jiménez should never have being deported.
It “shouldn’t” but “it does” happen. Since 2006 there are reports of similar events from California to Nueva York, regularly based on administrations who do not want to spend money on their indigent patients. And Obama’s policies provide an excellent cover for them.
Quelino’s case should attract national and International attention. With or without papers, no human being should be treated this way, and all activists, human rights advocates, civil rights lawyers and of course immigration activists should take notice and act on it.