Bay Area Nurses to Protest Deportation of Their Severely Ill Patient

Categories:

When:
September 6, 2019 @ 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
2019-09-06T12:30:00-07:00
2019-09-06T14:00:00-07:00
Where:
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital
47 52nd St. Oakland
CA 94609
Contact:
415-745-5833

 

Sending Maria Isabel Bueso to Guatemala amounts to a death sentence

Registered nurses from California Nurses Association (CNA) and other health care workers will protest the impending deportation of one of their severely ill patients on Friday, Sept. 6, announced CNA.

Maria Isabel Bueso, 24, has been treated since she was a young child at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland for a rare genetic disease. In August, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) sent a letter informing Bueso that she and her family must leave the United States or be deported at the end of September.

“As caregivers and human beings, we can’t sit on the sidelines while the Trump administration puts the lives of our patients at risk,” said Aina Gagui, an RN at Children’s Hospital. “Immigrants are human beings whose lives are not to be thrown away at the whim of the most callous federal government we’ve ever seen.”

When Bueso was a child, she emigrated with her family from Guatemala to the United States under medical deferred action at the invitation of doctors who wanted her to participate in clinical drug trials. She receives lifesaving weekly medical treatments at Children’s Hospital for mucopolysaccharidosis type VI, a disease that causes short stature and other physical deformities.

“You’re really handing her a death sentence,” said Dr. Paul Harmatz, Bueso’s physician, on MSNBC. “It’s as if we’re pulling the plug on a respirator or stopping feedings for a patient that needs that type of support.”

Bueso, along with other extremely ill patients, had previously been given permission to stay in the United States to receive lifesaving medical treatment that is unavailable in their home countries. Deportation will put her life and other patients’ lives at risk.

 

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