Allentown, PA: Relatives and nonprofit organizations have obtained the defense of a Dominican mother in a coma at the Lehigh Valley Health Network-Cedar Crest Hospital, whose administration has decided to deport her to the Dominican Republic. The organizations’ claims indicate that said health center allows the transfer of the woman identified with the pseudonym S.C. to be transferred to another hospital in the United States where she can provide the required medical care.
S.C., a mother of two children, received a notice from the hospital on February 28 informing her that she would be flown to the Dominican Republic on a private plane. Her family did not agree, and she began to search against the clock for a health center that could admit her after a complication in her state of health after an aneurysm operation that she underwent in December at said hospital.
Now, S.C. is about to be deported from the same hospital bed where she lies in a coma, sparking a wave of protests organized by various nonprofit organizations outside Lehigh Valley Health Network-Cedar Crest Hospital. she continues to care for her until she can be transferred to another hospital, where they want to expel her.
“She is bedridden and requires a high level of care to recover and survive,” read the petition backed by nonprofits, including the Free Migration Project and the Pennsylvania Citizenship and Immigration Coalition.
S.C.’s husband, Junior Rivas, who preferred to use a pseudonym, spoke exclusively to Prism Reports that she could die if they put her on a plane: “They haven’t even put back the piece of her skull that was removed to ease the pain and inflammation in the brain,” he explained.
Prism Reports says the 46-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital on December 29, 2022. A day later, she underwent surgery, but the result was not as expected, and on December 30, doctors had to induce a eat. Since then, the outlet narrates, the hospital staff has asked Rivas several times if she wants to disconnect it.
Rivas explained to Prism Reports that, given her refusal, on February 27, they gave him three options: pay a daily expense of $500 for the use of the equipment that he keeps his wife breathing; find another hospital that can treat her or accept her deportation to the Dominican Republic. This Thursday, the hospital gave him seven more days to choose between the three options.
In response to the hospital’s request to S.C.’s family, about twenty activists protested outside to demand that her mother not be deported: “No more medical deportations!” they shouted. “Up medical attention. Down with medical deportations”, they were heard saying in multiple videos posted on the social networks of these organizations.
What is happening to S.C.? It is nothing new in the country. The report’ Fatal Flights: America’s Medical Deportation,’ published jointly in 2021 by the Free Migration Project and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, estimated that thousands of patients with chronic medical conditions have been deported in recent years. Years for hospitals. And in some cases, migrants have died after being sent to hospitals abroad.
