Undocumented Immigrants Keep Falling Through the Cracks for getting Covid vaccine

[riversedge]

As Many Americans Get COVID-19 Vaccines and Financial Support, Undocumented Immigrants Keep Falling Through the Cracks
https://time.com/5944806/undocumented-immigrants-covid-19/





By LJ Dawson / Kaiser Health News

March 8, 2021 7:00 AM EST

Ana’s 9-year-old son was the first in the family to come down with symptoms that looked like COVID-19 last March. Soon after, the 37-year-old unauthorized immigrant and three of her other children, including a daughter with asthma, struggled to breathe.

For the next three weeks, the family fought the illness in isolation—Ana clutching the top of door frames to catch her breath—while friends and neighbors left food on the porch of their home in Colorado Springs, Colo. Ana and her children never took tests to confirm they caught the virus, but the pressure in her lungs, the fever, the headache and the loss of smell and taste convinced her it couldn’t be anything else.

“It was horrible,” said Ana, a Colorado resident for more than two decades who requested her last name not be used because of her immigration status. “We had to lay on the floor to breathe.”

Nearly a year later, the effects of the virus go far beyond nagging shortness of breath for Ana. She lost her job cleaning houses when she got sick in spring 2020, so she couldn’t pay rent. A local nonprofit’s cash assistance funded by some federal COVID-19 relief helped her catch up in the fall, but she still had no work, and fell behind on rent again. Her landlord finally threw the family out of their home at the beginning of January with 30 hours’ notice, she said.


Ana is one of the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission, who are particularly vulnerable to the economic fallout wrought by the pandemic and have no direct access to the billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief over the last year. An estimated 4 in 5 of them work essential jobs that put them at high risk to catch the COVID-19 virus. They are also more likely to suffer the economic consequences, even with protections in place—such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, extended through March—because they fear that reaching out for help or reporting landlords could lead to deportation or detention.........................