Harrington: Don’t Answer the Abbott Hospital Question

Sometimes it’s more unsettling than usual how far Governor Greg Abbott will go to beat up on immigrants, who are fleeing their homes because of violence, persecution, or crippling economic necessity. This time he is on a campaign that he knows will hurt the health of children and their parents and perhaps cause the deaths of some.

Abbott has issued a decree that hospitals ask patients if they are U.S. citizens. The hospitals have no option because, if they do not ask the question, he threatens to cut their funding as he did with Dr. Tony Pastor, a cardiologist at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston for suggesting that hospitals not ask the question. 

What Abbott does not require hospitals to tell prospective patients and those in emergency rooms is that they do not have to answer the question. The U.S. Constitution protects people regardless of citizen status from having to answer the question.

Abbott claims that he’s issued his mandate to learn how many immigrants with undocumented status are receiving hospital care and the cost thereof. He already knows the answer, however. Studies abound on this question including by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Houston Chronicle, which actually show a decreasing cost in the last few years.

The governor’s cruel tactic will certainly keep critically ill people away from the medical care they need out of fear. He knows that. We all know that. Some will become even sicker, and some may die. Children and adults. Political machination and self-promotion seem to be the only viable explanations. Abbott issued the executive order three months before the November election to take effect four days before the election.

Immigrants live in fear of being suddenly deported and leaving their kids behind. I worked in South Texas for ten years and saw the anxiety that people lived with. Even if they had lawful status in the country, even if they had become American citizens, they lived in apprehension that the government could still deport them. Given American history, that is an understandable fear. 

This has happened before. In 1931, the U.S. government helped organize a massive deportation of 1.8 million people of Mexican descent, including citizens and legal residents, who comprised one-third or more of those “repatriated,” to use the Orwellian euphemism of the day. Some of those deported were “rounded up” at hospitals by government agents. 

In recent years, a McAllen hospital dressed its security officers in dark green uniforms similar to those of the U.S. Border Patrol. That had the intended effect of keeping people away from the hospital. María Gómez, an intrepid United Farm Workers Union organizer, singlehandedly compelled the hospital to back down.

Wherever anyone stands on the immigration question, no one should stand in the way of helping critically ill people and children.

We can resist Abbott’s unconscionable order. He is too hot-headed politically to repeal his own order, but we can all refuse to answer the citizenship question, if hospital care is needed. And we can encourage family and friends to also not answer the Abbott question. It is our right and our way of showing solidarity and non-violent resistance. If we all refuse to answer the Abbott question, then the governor will no longer have even the pretextual justification for his order because it will not yield the data he claims it will.

We need to do more than criticize this wrongheaded and politically-driven gubernatorial edict. We need to stand in solidarity for the health and welfare of everyone in our community and refuse to answer the Abbott question.

It is unpardonable that any person be discouraged or driven from hospital care because of their immigration status. That’s immoral, un-American, and contrary to our shared Scriptures.

Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by James Harrington, a human rights attorney and the retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is now a priest at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author. 

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