A judge extended a temporary block on a law preventing the state of Idaho from asking patients with HIV to prove their legal status.
The state receives assistance through the Ryan White program, a federal service that provides treatment to low-income patients who cannot afford HIV care. The program exempts recipients from having to show their immigration status to receive care.
The lawsuit challenged HB 135, a new Idaho law that prohibits state funds from being used to benefit people without legal documentation.
At a hearing Tuesday, representatives for the plaintiffs — five HIV patients and their doctor, physician Abby Davids — argued state law cannot preempt federal mandates to prevent communicable diseases.
When asking for the injunction, plaintiffs — joined by the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center- said preventing access to medication could cause patients to suffer serious health issues, including death.
The defendants argued the federal exemptions are not mandates, and states can choose additional eligibility requirements.
Speaking after the hearing, main plaintiff and family physician Dr. Davids said that without treatment, HIV is universally fatal.
“[Patients] will get very sick and they will have a sort of slow, torturous progression to AIDS and then eventually death,” Davids said.
In a release published last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was revoking a 1998 interpretation of a policy extending “certain federal public benefits to illegal aliens."
“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration” said Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Davids described the Ryan White program as a payer of last resort - those who qualify for assistance have no other options. Treating all HIV patients, regardless of their immigration status, and therefore preventing them from transmitting the highly communicable disease is a matter of public health, she added.
“When people have access to treatment for HIV, access to care, and they're on their medications, the virus becomes undetectable in their body, which means they cannot transmit it to other people,” said Dr. Davids. “So HIV, while a communicable disease, is not transmittable when somebody is on treatment. And so that is a huge benefit to the entire community, not just the individual patients with HIV.”
“It's disheartening to me that we're putting sort of this value statement on a care that is absolutely lifesaving and absolutely necessary, and that we can very easily provide,” Davids added.
Davids cares for patients who live with HIV across the Treasure Valley and the Magic Valley. She said about 45 patients receiving assistance through the Ryan White program in that coverage area are at risk of losing access to treatment.
The extended restraining order prevents the law from being enforced until the judge issues a decision on a preliminary injunction in the coming weeks.
After the hearing, the judge granted provisional class action status to the lawsuit, blocking the state law from applying to all immigrants in the state, not just the plaintiffs in the case.
The federal assistance program at the center of the lawsuit was named after Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who was banned from his school following an HIV diagnosis in the 1980s. He passed away at the age of 18, shortly before the Ryan White CARE Act was signed into law by George W. Bush. The program is the largest federal service dedicated to HIV treatment in the country.
