All-White Florida Jury Sanctions Private Deportations by Hospital

Great job in voir dire, defendants' attorneys.  You succeeded in bleaching the jury.

A Mayan Indian from the highlands of Guatemala, Mr. Jiménez paid a smuggler to transport him to the United States about a decade ago so he could work as a gardener and send money home to his wife and two sons. He had been living in Stuart with Mr. Gaspar for just under a year when a drunken driver in a stolen vehicle plowed into his car in the winter of 2000.

Now 37, Mr. Jiménez, who cannot walk and has the mental age of a child, lives in a one-room house in a remote village, tended by his elderly mother. He is largely confined to his bed and suffers from routine seizures. When The Times visited him last summer, he had not received medical care for over five years.

In Florida, Martin Memorial, a nonprofit hospital, spent $1.5 million to care for Mr. Jiménez. The costs especially mounted because of a conundrum faced by the hospital. As a condition of receiving Medicaid and Medicare money, the hospital was required to care for Mr. Jiménez until it could properly discharge him under federal law.

That meant discharging Mr. Jiménez into a skilled nursing home, but the hospital could not find one willing to accept an uninsured illegal immigrant. So it kept Mr. Jiménez as a boarder until, in 2003, a state judge gave the hospital permission to send him back to Guatemala.

Martin Memorial's staff should be proud to work at a hospital that finds creative ways to circumvent federal regulations to send sick patients to their death abroad.  Congressional Republicans should be proud to be blocking reform to both the broken immigration and health care systems that ensure these private deportations will be repeated.  Stuart's white jurors should be proud for sticking it to the low-income Guatemalans who clean their bathrooms and prepare their food.  And for being white, I guess.

This is a result in which everyone involved can take pride!

[Image: Josh Haner/The New York Times]