Demands

Moratorium on Deportations Campaign has always confronted the deportation/detention system and border militarization as mechanisms that designate entire populations as less worthy of humanity. Hospitals have been nodes in the structures of the immigration/militarization/prison industrial complex, places that have funneled severely ill people into the net of Homeland Security. But hospitals are also places that parse out the difference between who shall be saved and who shall be left to die — because in a profit-driven world, once bodies are no longer exploitable they are not worth saving. Hospitals routinely deny life-saving transplants to undocumented people who are poor and uninsured — and so the politics of death, or necropolitics, extends from the devastation of distant lands, to the deathscapes of the border, to the slick and precise violence of the hospital. We stand in solidarity with undocumented people on hunger strike who demand transplants for themselves and loved ones. They are confronting two racist and unjust systems that are intimately connected: immigration and health care. Their demands extend beyond their own cases, to include affordable access to life-saving transplants for all patients based on need and not based on immigration status or ability to pay. Below is a letter from the hunger strikers.

July 29, 2013

We, the family members and friends of patients that are in need of a transplant have started a hunger strike. We have taken this extreme measure because hospitals have refused to add our loved ones to the transplant lists because they lack immigration status and because they lack insurance. Most of the patients are either receiving dialysis or are dependent on medication to stabilize their illness. We have been told there is no financial assistance for a transplant for uninsured patients. We find this to be unjust and inhumane. We cannot sit and wait until our loved ones die.

We will not end the hunger strike until the following demands are met:

1. The fourteen undocumented patients in critical need of organ transplants are put on hospital waitlists

2. A concrete system is established to evaluate each case and then place patients on a waiting list for a transplant based on need and not legal or financial status.

3. Policies are established that ensure affordable medicine for waitlist candidates before and after transplant.

Contact: Fr. Jose S. Landaverde 773-512-8015

Sincerely,

The family and friends of patients in need of a transplant. Lista de Huelga de Hambre •Maria De El Carmen Garcia •Maria Garcia •Juan Balbuena •Chris Hernandez •Heriberto Balbuena •Veronica Rivera •Tania Reyna •Maria Galvez •Lorena Galvez •Blanca Gomes •Padre; Jose S. Landaverde •Rev. Luis Alvarenga •Vanessa Jauregui •Rosa Gomez •Leticia Hes Peninal •Osbeidy Rivery

PATIENTS IN NEED OF TRANSLPANTS •Lorenzo Arroyo (LIVER) •Martin Hernandez (KIDNEY) •Marisol Rivera (KIDNEY) •Blanca Gomez (KIDNEY) •Isidrio Secundino(KIDNEY) •Maria Isabel Mariano (LIVER) •Marcos Noe Garcia (KIDNEY) •Sarai Rodriguez (LIVER) •Gustavo Galvez (KIDNEY) •Juana H. Rodriguez (KIDNEY) •Teodora Toyalo (KIDNEY)