Hospital Employees Union fights to stop New West family’s deportation

A family of five who have been living in New Westminster since 2017 are facing deportation by Canada Border Services Agency after they lost their refugee claim.

A healthcare worker at Royal Columbian Hospital, Claudia Zamorano and her family, including her 9-year-old daughter, will be deported back to their native Mexico where the family says they face violence and death threats unless the federal government intervenes.

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Zamorano says the experience has been especially traumatic for her daughter.

“[She] can’t sleep properly right now. She is scared of officers. She cries and asks why we cannot be here if we are not bad people,” she said.

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Now, the Hospital Employees Union is appealing to Federal Immigration Minister Sean Fraser to grant them permanent residence based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

“Claudia has an active role in ensuring safe direct patient care, and she never should have been excluded from the special measures that were introduced for refugee claimants working in health care during the pandemic,” HEU President Barb Nederpel said.

The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s healthcare worker immigration program does not include housekeepers like Zamorano.

Last month, the CBSA informed the family the deportation is set for August 5. More than 900 letters of support have been written to the Immigration Minister on the family’s behalf.

“We join so many others calling on the IRCC to quickly approve this family’s permanent residency application so that they can continue to build their community and so they can finally find some stability, some peace, and some security in their life,” Nederpel said.

In a statement on Wednesday, HEU secretary-business manager Meena Brisard says that Zomorano has been “on the front lines of infection control, cleaning and sanitizing hospital rooms to keep other health care workers, patients and members of the community safe from COVID-19.”

“At a time when our health care system is facing massive staffing shortages, we should not be turning away health care workers, especially those who have contributed and sacrificed so much to help us through a pandemic,” Brisard said.

With files from OMNI