Nearly 200 medical students and residents, including fourth-year University of New Mexico School of Medicine student Yazmin Irazoqui Ruiz, could see their years of hard work and future in medicine ground to a total halt by a court decision coming as early as next year, according to a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). They are Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, and a case around Donald Trump’s termination of the program is set to go in front of the Supreme Court next month.
Should the justices side with his administration’s unlawful decision to end DACA—and Trump has already gone onto Twitter to urge them to do just that—Yazmin and 189 others would be uprooted from the only country they’ve ever known as home. “I don’t know what I’d do if DACA was rescinded,” she told the AAMC. Like many others in her field, her desire to go into medicine came from a personal place that has led her to want to help others.
“I came to medical school so that I could eventually provide care to people like my mom and my grandmother, who had breast cancer that wasn’t detected until it metastasized,” she continued. “My grandmother wouldn’t have had metastatic breast cancer if she had had access to health care.”
That drive is echoed by first-year student and DACA recipient Ali Torabi, who was also profiled in the AAMC article. He enrolled at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine after seeing the disparities “between my community and the communities that had access to health care,” he said, something he experienced himself: He remembers skipping a doctor’s visit for a serious injury because of costs. “It’s hard to see members of my community with diseases that could be cured if they were allowed to go to a clinic,” he said. “There’s no reason why I can’t be that doctor to provide that health care and access to health care.”
Dr. Atul Grover, MD, executive vice president of the AAMC, said the administration is seeking to end DACA and deport these medical students and residents when the U.S. will face “a shortage of as many as 122,000 physicians in the next 10 years [and] we cannot afford to lose even one physician, let alone 190.” The damage to the lives of both these professionals and their patients extends far beyond those 190, too: The Center for American Progress said in a report last month that as many as 27,000 DACA recipients work in health care practitioner and support occupations.
These young immigrants have already been working hard to help save lives, but they’re also working hard to help save the program that allows them to continue doing their work, according to the AAMC article. That includes Dr. New Latthivongskorn of the University of California, San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital’s Family and Community Medicine Department, who is a plaintiff in the legal action going before the Supreme Court.
Earlier this year, Yazmin Irazoqui Ruiz told Congress that with DACA, “I could finally breathe a sigh of relief.” But now, “Here we are, facing that being taken away.”