San Juan. – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Puerto Rico demanded this Wednesday explanations from the Puerto Rican Government for allowing the arrest of migrant people in health centers “preventing said community from receiving the care services it needs”, after the detention of a Haitian man who accompanied his pregnant wife to the hospital on Christmas Eve.
“If they deport that boy, they are going to kill him; his family has been murdered by gangs in Haiti. He went to take his wife to the hospital, and they grabbed him at the door and took him away,” Leonard Prophil, community leader and spokesperson for Haitians in Puerto Rico, denounced to EFE.
The ACLU and other organizations in charge of the ‘Migrate is a Right’ campaign requested answers in a statement to the governor of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González; the Secretary of Health, Víctor Ramos, and the interim director of the Homeland Security Investigations Office (HSI, in English) in the archipelago, Yariel Ramos.
Prophil asserted that “it is inhumane” that agents of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained this morning the 27-year-old man, who is a member of their community and who went to the hospital institution of ‘
Health Pro Med‘ in Barrio Obrero of San Juan, with his wife who is almost six months pregnant.
The
TPS was requested precisely because of the insecurity situation in Haiti and the
imminent danger that any case represents of deportation.
In this context, the ACLU of Puerto Rico, Comuna Caribe, Kilómetro Cero and Amnesty International of Puerto Rico, recalled that the interim director of HSI in San Juan, Yariel Ramos, recently stated that the federal agency promised not to make arrests in hospitals and health centers.
“It’s not just about not making arrests inside hospitals, but also in the surrounding areas, as the community has already denounced on several occasions and as, indeed, we were able to confirm happened this morning. This discriminatory action has the same effect of preventing and discouraging immigrant people from having access to health services,” the organizations emphasized.
They also denounced that the man’s detention, just before entering the clinic, occurred without due process of law, in a discriminatory manner and motivated solely by his racial profile.
