A Chicago hospital is preparing to send a 30-year-old patient back to Mexico. Francisco Pantaleon, who is in this country illegally, had a brain hemorrhage last month and is in a coma at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.

The hospital says his immediate family consents to returning him to his home country, but Pantaleon’s sister and cousin have retained a lawyer to fight the hospital. The Chicago Tribune has the story.

The practice of hospital deporting immigrants has been in the public eye lately — the New York Times had a big piece on the subject earlier this month.

Hospitals are obliged to arrange for patients’ post-hospital care, and Medicaid doesn’t cover long-term care for illegal immigrants.

“It’s important to make sure that hospitals aren’t permitted to dump patients on an international level when they can’t do it on a local level,” a lawyer working with Pantaleon’s sister and cousin told the Trib.

Pantaleon, who has been in this country for 11 years, is uninsured and was working at a carwash, the article says. Officials at the hospital say he’s unlikely to recover from his coma, and they’ve arranged to transfer him to a hospital in Acapulco, Mexico.

“We can’t arrange long-term care here, so we try to do the best we can in the country of origin,” the hospital’s chief medical officer at told the Trib.

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