NEWS

Sick Honduran woman fights deportation, with help of Daytona Beach doctors, immigration lawyer

Seth Robbins
seth.robbins@news-jrnl.com
Doris Fuentes recounts how she was in danger of being deported back to her home country of Honduras, despite suffering from a kidney disease. She is among many undocumented immigrants around the country who have suddenly found themselves targeted for deportation under the Trump administration's immigration policies. [News-Journal/Seth Robbins]

Doris Fuentes knew exactly what it meant when the immigration officers escorted her to a separate room.

In the four years that she had ritually gone to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Orlando, she had seen others enter that door and then never leave. One man had exited in handcuffs.

Fuentes was facing the prospect of being immediately deported after having lived in the U.S. illegally for some two decades. Her immigration attorney, Diego Handel, argued against her removal, telling immigration officials that she was suffering from kidney disease, and that two of her doctors reported her deportation to Honduras would be akin to a “death sentence.”

But the inch-thick packet of medical records did little to dissuade the officers. He said an agent continually told them: “We have to take her now because it’s time. We are a country of laws and we have to carry out the law.”

Fuentes, a Daytona Beach resident who cleans houses for a living, is among many undocumented parents, students and community members who have suddenly found themselves targeted for deportation after having spent the better part of their lives in the United States. President Donald Trump's administration has said that the increase in deportation arrests, which surged by 40 percent in 2017, is the result of effectively expanding immigration enforcement within the interior of the country. Critics, however, see it as evidence of a cruel crackdown that sweeps up immigrants whose only offense is to have entered the country illegally.

Recent high-profile cases include a New York pizza man arrested while delivering food to an Army base; two brothers — one a standout soccer player — deported to El Salvador after having grown up and attended high school in Maryland; and a father of three U.S.-born children who was sent back to Mexico after living a quiet life in the small town of Granger, Indiana, where he owned a restaurant with his wife, a naturalized citizen from Greece. And there are many more that never make the news.

“I keep my faith,” Fuentes said recently while sitting in Handel’s office. “I know it’s not only me in the world that is suffering something like this.”

Under the Trump administration, deportation guidelines have become far more sweeping, targeting immigrants who have what are called final orders of removal — an order from a judge that a person can be deported and has no more appeals left.

That was the case for Fuentes, said Handel, a Daytona Beach civil and immigration attorney.

Fuentes, 46, said she was put in touch with Handel after a family she works for had learned of her recent difficulties with immigration. Handel said her employer, whom he did not identify, was “very concerned that they were going to physically remove her, because all of all the signals coming out that everyone was getting deported.”

She was always at risk for deportation but likely would not have been a priority under former President Barack Obama’s administration, which largely focused its immigration enforcement on newly arrived immigrants and undocumented immigrants with felony convictions, Handel said. Fuentes — whose only scrape with law enforcement was a conviction for the false use of a passport, for which she was given three years probation — had frequently checked in with ICE officers in Orlando, without much trouble.

On April 2, Handel went with Fuentes to the ICE office, where he filed a stay of removal, asking that Fuentes not be deported because of her health issues. But the officers were adamant on holding her, he said. He described how a “parade of people” entered the room where they were being questioned to say that she had to be removed from the country. For some four hours, Handel argued with the officers, who even tried to suggest that Fuentes would receive better medical care in immigration detention.

Eventually, Fuentes’ medical records were sent to a unit in Virginia, after which the officer-in-charge said she could leave. But she was told to report back in three months. Handel said one of the officers also left him with a warning: “We are going to take her in 90 days, forget her medical problems, we are taking her.”

As Fuentes’ next check-in date approached, Handel found all his efforts coming up empty. An application to ICE for humanitarian parole, which he called a long shot, was rejected. Calls to Congressman Ron Desantis’ office went unanswered. And her application for a stay of removal was still pending.

A week before her appointment, Handel made one last-ditch effort. He prepared an emergency petition, asking a federal judge to block Fuentes’ deportation.

“Time was running out, and there was nothing else, nothing,” he said.

He offered to represent her in the suit at a reduced fee, but there was still a cost to file it. When they met at the federal court in Orlando, she had the necessary cash in-hand. The doctors treating her at the free Daytona Beach clinic, called Volusia Volunteers in Medicine, had collected the money.

In the suit, he wrote that Fuentes’ doctors “have concluded that the life-saving medical treatment she receives in the U.S. is not available in Honduras,” and he included two letters from them.

In one, Dr. Kathleen Santi said Fuentes had recently been hospitalized for sepsis, a deadly bloodstream infection that put further strain on her only viable kidney.

Having performed missionary work at a hospital in San Pedro Sula — a northern city in Honduras that is some six hours from San Marcos, the rural, mountain coffee-growing region where Fuentes is from — she said Fuentes would be considered a “charity case” and would not get proper care.

Santi said in a phone interview that the combination of Fuentes’ high blood pressure and her already taxed kidney is likely to lead to her needing chronic dialysis. It could also cause a sudden stroke or heart attack.

“They have talented physicians,” she said of the medical care in Honduras. “But the charity hospital cannot provide dialysis, so she would be left to die of renal failure. That is what I was looking at when I made those statements. She has only one kidney working.”

Handel argued that the administration’s efforts to enforce immigration laws were failing to “protect the most vulnerable” people, such as Fuentes, and he asked the court to intervene.

“The law is justice tempered by mercy,” Handel said. “But this administration has no mercy, no heart. It’s just the roughest, most brutal justice you can imagine.”

The emergency petition was a Hail Mary, he said. The president and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have wide executive authority to set and enforce immigration policies. And federal courts have long upheld their power to do so.

The judge, however, did not dismiss the suit when asked to by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Handel said. According to the court documents, ICE ultimately granted Fuentes another year in the country while the application for her stay of removal was processed.

“Thankfully, we were successful," Handel said. “For now, they are not going to physically take her, but that could change in a heartbeat.”

On a recent morning, Fuentes stood in the bright kitchen of a small house in Daytona Beach, where she lives with her brother and his family. She went over a scrawled list in Spanish of the few items she could eat: white meat, bread, and only certain fruits, such as an apple. She’d already lost six pounds. Her health, however, was continuing to get worse, making it difficult for her to clean houses.

She said she was grateful for the group of people who came to her aid when she most needed it: the volunteer doctors and nurses, the client who acted out of concern for her, and Handel, who put up such a strong fight on her behalf.

“Many people have helped me,” she said. “It’s pretty amazing.”

Nearby, Fuentes’ 3-year-old nephew, Ian, played with a purple, plastic T-rex, showing how he could put his finger in its sharp maw.

“Do you love your Titi?” she asked him. He responded by jumping in her lap and wrapping his arms around her head. He pulled at her brown hair streaked with blonde.

As she pressed her check to his face, tears welled in her eyes.