Court rules illegal immigrants are residents
BOISE – The Idaho Supreme Court ruled Monday that an undocumented immigrant who was injured while living in Ada County is entitled to medical indigency assistance from the county.
A majority of the justices sided with Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, which had sued the Ada County Board of Commissioners after it denied an application for medical indigency assistance from Javier Ortega Sandoval.
Sandoval had more than $187,000 in medical bills after he had a stroke while working in the Boise region.
The high court found that undocumented alien status doesn’t affect the determination of whether someone is a resident. In other words, the concept of residency doesn’t distinguish between citizens and those who entered the country illegally.
The ruling could have widespread impact. Some Idaho counties already provide emergency medical indigency assistance to illegal immigrants, but many do not, and hospitals cannot turn away emergency patients because of their inability to pay. That means hospitals may not be paid for the care.
Sandoval was working for Eagle Landscape Contractors on March 22, 2006, when he suffered a stroke, according to the ruling. He was taken to Saint Alphonsus and hospitalized nearly two months.
Sandoval’s son, Francisco Pacheco Sandoval, applied for medical indigency assistance from Ada County while his father was in the hospital.
The county turned down the request after learning Sandoval had come to Boise from Mexico in 2005 as an undocumented immigrant. County officials said he couldn’t be a resident of Idaho because he was an illegal immigrant and therefore could be subject to deportation at any time.
In its 4-1 decision, the Supreme Court held that the county incorrectly interpreted Idaho’s residency and medical indigency laws.
The medical indigency statute orders the county of residency of an indigent person to pay for medical services. The residency rule defines a resident as someone who has lived for 30 days or more in Idaho, excluding those who come for temporary purposes such as education or seasonal labor.
“Any attempt to import a person’s immigration status into the analysis would be to place a nonexistent objective test into our law,” Justice Roger Burdick wrote for the majority. “While Sandoval may have been subject to deportation proceedings, there is nothing in the record to indicate that this possibility created in him a subjective intent to return immediately to Mexico.”
Justice Warren Jones was the dissenter, contending that Sandoval’s purposes for residing in Idaho were indeed temporary.
Jones said Sandoval’s testimony that he intended to return to Mexico, where his wife and child still lived, supported the board’s finding that he was only here temporarily.
“The majority has in effect held that a person can be a resident of a place in which he has no legal right to be. That holding seems anomalous to me,” Jones wrote. “To me, his status here was analogous to a fugitive from justice on the run from the law. … Mr. Sandoval’s tenure in Idaho could last only as long as he successfully evades the authorities.”