Migrant Rights Organizations Request End to HIV Ban

by Dave Bennion

Published February 18, 2009 @ 08:00AM PT

More than 150 community based organizations signed on to the letter (pdf) below to President Obama recently requesting an administrative fix for another flawed immigration policy that has no basis in legislation.

The Senate last year repealed the law banning HIV+ people from visiting or immigrating to the U.S.  So why is the policy still in place?  Why are green card applications from HIV+ applicants still getting denied?

Nobody seems to know.

Dear President Obama,

We write to urge you to order the Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS") to publish a proposed rule to remove HIV from the HHS list of communicable diseases of public health significance as soon as possible.

As a former co-sponsor of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ("PEPFAR"), we are sure you are aware that this landmark legislation included a provision which struck the statutory language that required HIV to be designated a communicable disease of public health significance. In response to concerns about the potential increased costs to the U.S. health care system of removing HIV from the list, PEPFAR also raised future visa fees as an offset. On July 30, 2008, President Bush signed PEPFAR into law completing the first step in a two step process to end the ban.

However, as long as HIV remains on the HHS list of "communicable diseases of public health significance," non-citizens living with HIV are barred from visiting or immigrating to the U.S.

You have publicly stated your support for lifting the ban1 and we ask you to take immediate action to do so and thus to end the stigma against people with HIV and treat it like all other routine, chronic diseases. As HIV and immigration organizations, we call upon your Administration to carry out the will of Congress in lifting the ban. The ban on travel and immigration for non-citizens with HIV is anachronistic, discriminatory and undermines public health. As HHS recognized when it amended the definition of "communicable diseases" in October 2008, the American public needs protection from airborne, quarantinable diseases, not from viruses which cannot be casually transmitted such as HIV.

We applaud your commitment to moving this regulatory action forward expeditiously. The world is watching to see this ruling put into place. On August 3, 2008 at the International AIDS conference in Mexico City, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot, and International AIDS Society president Pedro Cahn all welcomed the action taken by the United States government towards lifting restrictions on entry for people living with HIV. It is time for HHS to take the final step and lift the ban.

Immigration Equality promises to share any response, and I'll repost it here if it comes.