A Venezuelan emergency room doctor arrested by immigration agents at a South Texas airport last month was released on Wednesday after more than four weeks in custody.
The doctor, Rubeliz Bolivar, 33, a resident at a hospital in the Rio Grande Valley, a federally designated underserved medical area, was detained after checking in for a flight to California on April 11. She was traveling with her 5-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, to join her husband for the couple’s asylum interview, which was scheduled for the following week in the Los Angeles area.
“My wife is an incredible mother and the heart of our family,” her husband, Milenko Faria, said on the eve of her release, which required a $7,000 bond. “These past weeks have been the hardest of our lives, watching our daughter miss her mother and feeling so powerless.”
“For the first time in weeks, we can breathe again,” he said, adding that he was grateful for advocacy that had brought attention to his wife’s situation.
Dr. Bolivar’s detention drew strong condemnation from national and regional medical associations. Her supervisors at the South Texas Health System in McAllen warned that losing foreign-born physicians like her compromised patient care in an impoverished region struggling with a doctor shortage.
A video shared with The New York Times by Dr. Bolivar’s husband on Wednesday afternoon shows her leaving the detention center in Texas and wiping away tears as Dr. Michael Menowsky, her program’s director, wearing scrubs, escorts her to a car. She was released with an ankle monitor, which tracks her movement.
Corey Martin, Dr. Bolivar’s lawyer, said the doctor, who has valid employment authorization, is expected to return to her residency program. “I will do everything in my power to ensure that is the case,” Ms. Martin said.
Dr. Bolivar was the second Venezuelan doctor within one week in April to be swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The other, Ezequiel Veliz, was arrested by Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint in South Texas on April 6. Dr. Veliz, 32, spent 10 days in detention before his release.
All told, at least five foreign-born physicians have been detained in recent months, according to Project IMG, an organization that represents thousands of international medical graduates in the United States. Four of the physicians were detained in Texas, while the other was detained in Florida.
For decades, the United States has relied on foreign physicians to serve rural communities that are often bypassed by American medical graduates. Recently, however, hospitals have had to place many of those physicians on administrative leave because of a pause in visa extensions, work permit renewals and green card processing for people from 39 countries on a travel-ban list. The affected doctors come from Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela, among other countries.
The Trump administration recently announced that an exemption would be put in place for certain physicians, but lawyers and advocacy groups said that no affected doctors had been notified of a change in their immigration status.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Dr. Bolivar’s release. After her arrest, the agency said in a statement that the physician had overstayed her tourist visa and “had no legal status.”
Overstaying a visa would typically not result in the arrest of someone with a pending immigration case.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
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