Domestic Violence Victim Killed By Boyfriend After ICE Ignored Her Pleas For Protection And Deported Her

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In 2009, Laura S., an undocumented domestic abuse victim was stopped for a driving infraction and pleaded three times with immigration officials to stay in the United States because of a violent ex-boyfriend associated with the Mexican drug cartel. Despite explaining that she would be at risk of death and that she had a protective order against the ex-boyfriend in Texas, Laura was forced to return to Mexico without ever seeing an immigration judge. She was found dead in a burning vehicle five days after she was sent back.

This month, Laura’s family filed a lawsuit, as Equal Voice first reported last week, against the four unknown border agents who allegedly “violated her procedural due process rights and failed and refused to consider her clear eligibility for relief from removal.”

The lawyer handling Laura’s case indicated that “she has seen government documents that say Laura ‘voluntarily returned’ to Mexico…Voluntary departure is not supposed to short cut rights or paperwork.” In fact, Laura “never willingly accepted any voluntary departure, and instead continued to plead that she not be sent to Mexico.”

Efficient, misleading, and under recent litigious scrutiny, voluntary departure is a contentious deportation scare tactic that ICE agents use to tell undocumented immigrants that they can either choose to face months imprisoned while waiting for their cases to be decided, or leave immediately for a chance to gain legal status once they are back in Mexico.

While the promise of legal status is technically true, there would be a ten-year ban for such immigrants who try to apply for the status. This has happened to enough immigrants that a class-action lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, which seeks to make border agents clarify the consequences of voluntary departure, including the ten-year return ban.

In normal immigration proceedings in which a judge would adjudicate the outcome of an immigrant’s status, Laura’s pleas would not have been ignored. The enforcement officials instead detained her, put her in a van, and forced her to cross the border in the middle of the night, according to the lawsuit.

Laura could have been under consideration for the U-visa, which grants temporary deportation reprieve to domestic violence victims. Only 10,000 U-visas are granted every year, of which a majority of the recipients are women from Latin America.

However even with the possibility of a U-visa, there are still more applicants than there are visas every year. Laura’s case thus highlights an extreme, but not rare, incident of how forced border crossings could kill domestic abuse victims.

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Hospital Deports Comatose Stroke Victim Back To Poland Without Telling Anyone

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A New Jersey hospital deported a comatose undocumented immigrant to Poland after discovering that he was uninsured, much to the Polish consulate’s surprise. According to the New York Daily News and the Polish newspaper, Nowy Dziennik, the hospital took advantage of a sneaky but legal process called medical repatriation, in which stabilized undocumented patients can be deported back to their native countries.

The 69-year-old patient, Wladyslaw Haniszewski was in the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital being treated for blood disease when he suffered a major stroke that rendered him unconscious. The hospital decided to deport him after discovering he had no health insurance. According to the NY Daily News, the diplomats handling his case did not receive word of his deportation until he had turned up in a Polish hospital. The director at the Polish hospital said that Haniszewski was “dumped on the doorstep” before they had even agreed to the transfer. This should not have happened since there must be consent either by the patient, who in this case was comatose, family, or a court guardian, whom the Polish diplomats were securing when Haniszewski was deported.

Haniszewski lived in the US for 30 years, and recently moved into a shelter after losing his job and apartment, according to a friend interviewed by the NY Daily News. Because Haniszewski does not have Polish health insurance, his care is costing the Polish hospital hundreds of dollars a day.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of the government insisted that it “does not get involved in repatriations undertaken by hospitals.” Yet in other cases where medical repatriation occur, numerous consular officials have said they have been pressured by Congressmen and other government officials to release travel documents for patients who would otherwise be too unstable to transfer out the hospital, let alone the country. In one example, despite a patient’s refusal to leave a Chicago hospital, a congressman pressured the Guatemalan consulate to issue a travel document for the patient’s medical repatriation.

Unfortunately Haniszewski is hardly the only patient deported by an institution designated to provide aid. Over the course of six years, more than 800 patients were deported from at least 15 states back to their home countries by hospitals across fifteen states.

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