The radicalization of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Ken Cuccinelli continues, now that the agency has told a number of Boston families that had been allowed to stay in the U.S. while their children undergo vital treatment—including for cancer, cerebral palsy, and cystic fibrosis—to leave the country within 33 days or be thrown into deportation proceedings.
It’s not just Massachusetts, either: “Advocates say similar letters from [USCIS] have been issued to immigrants in California, North Carolina and elsewhere.” Previously, USCIS allowed some immigrants short-term deportation relief through what’s known as medical "deferred action,” so that family members could receive or continue medical care, while parents would also be given permission to work legally. But this could now mostly be a thing of the past for many.
USCIS says it will now consider deferred status only “for military members and their families,” the AP reports, and will instead delegate all nonmilitary requests to Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and what could ever go wrong there? The Boston families who received the letter said they were never told of this change, and, to add insult to injury, got their letters as late as “halfway through that grace period” of 33 days.
Among the parents and children told to leave the U.S. in just weeks are Mariella Sanchez and her 16-year-old son Jonathan, who has been undergoing cystic fibrosis treatment for three years now. “Jonathan missed two years of school in Honduras because of his illness,” MassLive reported, but “in Boston, he has resumed school and gotten help from a tutor when he’s too sick to go to class.”
Mariella doesn’t have to be told what could happen should the family be deported: 18 years ago, she lost another child, Samantha, to the same disease. “That’s why we came here, to get help for Jonathan. For us, it’d be very difficult to lose another child.” She said that when they got to the U.S., Jonathan “was practically dying. In these last three years, we’ve been able to save him.”
Allowing kids like Jonathan to continue their treatment is a matter of basic human dignity and decency, but USCIS is Cuccinelli’s agency now, and a man who once compared immigrants to rats is rapidly helping turn what’s supposed to be a paper-pushing agency that helps facilitate legal immigration into another anti-immigrant arm of the federal government, including going onto cable news to defend workplace raids, even though they have literally nothing to do with his job.
Unlike folks from the administration, Mariella is a decent person, and she’s worried about what could happen to other families and kids like her Jonathan who are in a similar situation. “We’re not just talking about ourselves, we’re talking about a lot of families, and it’s not fair what they’re doing to us,” she said. “This is a new low,” commented Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. “Donald Trump is literally deporting kids with cancer.”