Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley submitted a formal request with federal agencies for a waiver to allow a 4-month-old Iranian girl to travel to Oregon for heart surgery, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive Friday afternoon.
The infant, whose name is Fatemah Taghizadeh, was diagnosed with a heart condition last month and told she needed surgery. Doctors in Iran did not have the equipment needed for the procedure, so her parents turned to OHSU Hospital, one of the top hospitals in the country for pediatric heart surgery, her uncle, Samad Taghizadeh, told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
“They said she has a very serious problem, that this is an emergency and we need to do the surgery right now,” he said. Doctors in Iran would only have a 20 percent chance of success if they were to attempt the surgery there, according to a spokeswoman from Merkley’s office.
Fatemah’s parents were hoping to meet with doctors in Portland on Feb. 5 and the family was set to begin their journey to the U.S. on Saturday. The family planned to fly from Tehran to Dubai where they would apply for the visa.
But they learned that they would be unable to make the trip after travel from Iran was barred by President Donald Trump’s executive order barring immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, just the day before.
Merkley took notice of the situation and assigned one of his staffers to see what he could do to expedite the process. On Friday, he said that he was seeking a waiver to the ban for both Fatemah and her parents from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
“I can’t imagine the State Department wouldn’t grant such a waiver,” he said. “A little girl’s life is at stake.”
Still, the government is a bureaucracy and bureaucracies are not known for their efficiency. Adding to that, Merkley said, is the fact that most of the upper echelons of government are still in the midst of a transition from one administration to the next.
“We’ve never done this during such a state of rapid transition,” he said. “We’re going to pursue every angle we have with this.”
Doctors determined Fatemah would need at least one urgent surgery, possibly more, to fix structural abnormalities and two holes in her heart, a condition that worsens over time.
“Her heart is twisted. Her heart’s working overtime to compensate … and it’s causing more and more damage to her every day that she doesn’t have the surgery,” attorney Amber Murray, who is assisting the family’s petition for a visa waiver, told the Associated Press.
Merkley is hoping he can obtain a waiver for Fatemah soon, but beyond that, he is hoping that her case will set a precedent for other sick foreigners.
“The conversation in Washington D.C. is about national security,” Merkley said. “The reality is that there are thousands of other people whose lives are being disrupted in similar ways.”
In a letter released Friday, a group of mostly-Republican lawmakers called on President Trump to grant special consideration to military translators and children in need of medical care seeking treatment in the U.S., the New York Daily News reported.
“For such individuals, time is not an ally,” the group wrote.
Taghizadeh told the Associated Press that his first preference is to have the surgery performed in Portland, close to home, but his family is now looking at other specialty hospitals in places like Canada and Germany.
It was Merkley’s hope, however, that it wouldn’t come to that and that a waiver would be granted.
“Morally, it’s just the right thing to do,” he said.
Late Friday afternoon, a judge in Washington state issued a temporary restraining order halting the immigration ban nationwide, but it was unclear what immediate effect that would have on Fatemah and her family.
— Kale Williams
kwilliams@oregonian.com
503-294-4048
@sfkale
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