David Chavez-Macias is getting deported to his possible death today. Two decades ago, Chavez-Macias was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a “rare and sometimes fatal genetic syndrome causes the aorta, the blood vessel that carries blood to the heart, to grow could be fatal without proper medical treatment,” reports the Reno Gazette Journal. But in that time, he’s gotten the case he needs and has never stopped moving, working as a landscaper and paying his taxes. But Chavez-Macias is also undocumented, and despite living here for three decades with no criminal record, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has ordered him to buy a one-way ticket to Mexico:
[Attorney Dee] Sull said the 52-year-old man's medical condition is grave and it is unlikely he will have access to medicine or treatment he needs.
"It is a death sentence," Sull said.
"But it did not matter," Sull said. "No one should feel good about what has happened and what this man has been going through."
"This administration doesn't want to do anything humanitarian," said Sull, who was told Thursday through U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's office that nothing else could be done.
Chavez-Macias had gone into sanctuary in Reno church last April, after he made the mistake of turning left on a red light and had his work permit revoked. “Another car before turned on green, and when it was my turn it was already yellow," he said. Though he never missed his ICE appointments in the past, he feared the traffic ticket would make it his last. "We stand on a cloud of our ancestors who have stood up to unjust laws for centuries in this country,” Rev. Neal Anderson of Unitarian Universalist said at the time. Chavez-Macias received a six-month stay and began working with Sull in the hopes of another extension, only to have ICE deny the husband and dad of four. Barring a last-minute miracle, he’ll have to leave today:
"We were hopeful that something would be done," [Community Together Organizing Northern Nevada’s J.D.] Klippenstein said. "We felt like he was agreeing to everything they wanted."
Klippenstein said he and others will meet at the Reno Tahoe Airport at 11 a.m. Friday.
Chavez-Macias is expected to board a plane around 12:30 p.m.
"We want to say goodbye," Klippenstein. "It's our way of honoring David.”
Chavez-Macias and his family fear for his life, telling the Reno Gazette Journal that he takes seven medications daily for his incurable heart condition, and will likely need more surgeries in addition to the three he’s already had over the past few years. "If he gets moved or deported to a different country,” said Dr. Jason Crawford, who has treated Chavez-Macias for several years, “then I can't pick up the phone and talk to a doctor there, because I don't know who that would be nor where will he be.” He “said Chavez-Macias needs access to heart specialist, something unlikely in most parts of Mexico.”