Hunger strikers demanding access to organ transplants for undocumented immigrants initially planned to celebrate the end of the nine-day strike this weekend.
Instead, they are planning a funeral.
Sarai Rodriguez died at Stroger Hospital Friday while waiting for an organ transplant. Her family says Northwestern Memorial Hospital denied her an organ transplant evaluation because she was an undocumented immigrant. They now blame the hospital for her death.
Critics of the hospital’s transplant policy will walk a funeral procession from Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission to Northwestern Memorial Hospital Sunday –a seven-mile journey.
The marchers will carry caskets in honor of Rodriguez and about a dozen other undocumented immigrants needing transplants, but allegedly denied access because of their immigration status, organizers say.
Rozalinda Borcilă, an organizer for the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign, helped create Hunger Strike for Health with Our Lady of Guadalupe pastor and activist, Jose Landaverde.
“It’s going to be a painfully slow procession,” Borcilă said. The route would typically take two hours by foot, but the group of protesters will include children, seniors and the sick, which could make the walk three to five hours, she added.
View Hunger Strike for Health march to Northwestern Memorial in a larger map
After arriving at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the group plans to hold a funeral service for Rodriguez and camp in a public area near the hospital throughout the night and into Monday.
It was a last minute decision. Supporters were supposed to celebrate the end of the hunger strike this weekend, but they learned Rodriguez had passed away Friday night.
“People felt that marking her death in this way was important,” Borcilă said.
Fourteen people, including members of Rodriguez’s family stopped eating July 29, in protest of what they call discrimination against undocumented immigrants needing organ transplants. Northwestern Memorial officials began negotiations with the protesters on August 5. But the strikers only met with a Northwestern Memorial media representative who made vague verbal promises, they said.
“They were not made by anyone with any executive power” Borcilă said. “We were not able to see an executive.”
The group also met with representatives from UIC Medical centers and Christ Advocate Hospital. None of the negotiations resulted in promises in writing, so the protesters took their own notes and posted them online.
The Northwestern Memorial representative told the protesters that undocumented patients could be added to transplant lists and that the fourteen patients the group is fighting for could call and request an evaluation, Borcilă said.
But the protesters say the hospital still makes it difficult for undocumented immigrants, seniors and the poor to get transplants, which led to Rodriguez’s death.
Meanwhile the hospital continues to accept organ donations from these groups.
“Their discriminatory policy of taking organs from the undocumented but refusing to give them transplants because they cannot pay, amounts to a form of human trafficking,” organizers stated in a release.
Updated about the march will be added to the group’s Facebook page and website.
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