Madeline
Rookie
- Banned
- #1
[/QUOTFor almost four months, doctors and nurses at Advocate Christ Medical Center cared for the young Mexican laborer who had fallen from a roof and lost the ability to speak, breathe or move most parts of his body.
But Quelino Ojeda Jimenez was in the U.S. illegally, and just before Christmas he was taken from the Oak Lawn hospital, loaded on an air ambulance and flown to Oaxaca, capital of the Mexican state where he was born.
His abrupt departure, which Ojeda says was undertaken without his consent, outraged a group of Mexicans living in Chicago who had rallied to his aid, tending to him in the hospital and encouraging him not to give up.
Florinda Marcial, one of his frequent caregivers, said she pleaded with authorities to stop as Ojeda was rolled away on a gurney, dressed in a hospital gown, crying. Authorities at the Mexican Consulate in Chicago also said they tried to intervene.
"They threw him out like he was a piece of garbage," said Horacio Esparza, a disability rights advocate who runs the Progress Center for Independent Living in Forest Park.
Now, the 20-year-old man is in a Mexican hospital that is so resource-poor that it is reusing filters for the breathing machine needed to keep him alive. After an investigation completed late last week, Advocate Health Care the largest hospital network in Illinois acknowledged it never obtained Ojeda's permission to transfer him to Mexico.
Undocumented quadriplegic returned to Mexico from Chicago area - chicagotribune.com
Please read the linked article if you have time; I think the tone of it is worth discussing.
My reaction is, this should not have happened. The man was almost certainly working without legally-required safety equipment and the subcontractor who hired him should not have found it so easy to evade its workers' compensation obligations.
But it did happen. If the injured man has any legal remedies here, by all means I hope he pursues them. However, he was not here legally, his condition was stable and he was moved in a medically safe fashion. I think returning him to Mexico was not only permissible, it was obligatory.
What say you? Should a serious injury in the US result in some sort of ad hoc green card for the patient?