Move FM Global News

WASHINGTON, DC – The Trump administration has axed a program that allowed immigrants with serious health conditions, including children and people with disabilities, and their families to remain in the United States while receiving life-saving medical treatment.

The “medical deferred action” program was recently eliminated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services without warning, Human Rights Watch said Saturday.

Immigrants and visitors, and their families, are being notified by letter that they must leave the country within 33 days of receipt. For many immigrants, this means leaving critical medical care behind, which, Human Rights Watch says, could prove to be a death sentence.

The Trump administration previously acted to limit judges’ abilities to terminate deportation cases, particularly those involving sympathetic circumstances. This means that not only are thousands of immigrants with serious medical conditions at risk of deportation, but so too are their caretakers.

These policy changes, the human rights organisation said, are the latest example of the many ways in which the Trump administration has made life more difficult for children and people with disabilities.

Immigrants with disabilities and rare conditions sometimes come to the U.S. explicitly to seek health care as a result of a lack of rehabilitation services and substandard medical treatment available in their home countries.

They also come at the invitation of U.S. physicians conducting clinical trials of new therapies.

By removing allowances for immigrants in treatment, the Trump administration is endangering people’s rights to health and life, Human Rights Watch said.

(Photo credit: Susan L Sandys).