Man wants to give wife his liver, but he’s about to be deported
A Westminster woman with chronic liver disease made an extraordinary plea to U.S. immigration officials Tuesday, asking them to pause her husband’s deportation so that the couple can test whether he’s a match as a transplant donor.
Veronica Delgado said her husband, Mario Carlos Amaya Ortega, was moved last week from a detention facility in Aurora to another in Arizona, and his removal from the country could occur at any time. If he is returned to his native El Salvador — where an attorney representing the couple said he was a target of gang violence — Delgado said it would be years before he could come back to America. Her hopes for a transplant of a portion of his liver would likely be over.
“He tells me every time we talk to just stay strong, we’re going to be together,” said Delgado, who is a U.S. citizen. “But I know how the system works here.”
Delgado spoke Tuesday at a news conference at the offices of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which is championing her cause. An attorney representing Delgado, Catherine Chan, said she filed a petition Tuesday to reopen Amaya Ortega’s case based on procedural grounds. But Brendan Greene, the CIRC’s campaigns director, said he and Delgado also hope that officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will pause Amaya Ortega’s deportation for humanitarian reasons.
“The decision that ICE makes in this case could literally be saving a life,” Greene said.
Contacted Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman for ICE said he could not provide information about Amaya Ortega’s case on such short notice.
The request — to pause deportation proceedings to accommodate a possible organ donation — is rare but not unprecedented.
University of Denver law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández noted that the most recent version of ICE detention standards has a section on organ donation. Those standards state that, if a detainee wishes to donate an organ to an immediate family member, ICE “shall assist in the preliminary medical evaluation, contingent on the availability of resources” and “shall coordinate arrangements for the donation.”
But Chan said she is not optimistic of such an outcome during the Trump administration, which is why she is also pressing a procedural claim. Amaya Ortega came to the U.S. in 2007 — after, Chan said, members of the gang MS13 shot up his house — and requested asylum but was denied. Chan said an immigration judge allowed Amaya Ortega to voluntarily leave the country, but, when he didn’t, the judge’s ruling turned into a deportation order.
She said he has no criminal history.
Prior to being scooped up by ICE on May 25, Delgado said she and her husband had made plans to buy a new home. Amaya Ortega works in construction, she said, and he is also a doting caregiver to her as she battles nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, which is slowly destroying her liver and will soon require a transplant.
“Now,” she said, “I don’t know if I really want to wake up the next morning. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”