Blind Mexican Youth Denied Citizenship For Not Being Able To Read

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

How many stories do we read that come to our souls about the unjust situations that Latinos often experience when trying to legalize their situation in the United States … Many have broken our hearts, like those of children caged or separated from their parents at unimaginable ages, but this one is also amazing.

A young man blind from birth, the Mexican Lucio Delgado, emigrated to the United States in search, like so many other foreigners, for better opportunities in 2013. When he finally took his citizenship exam in 2018, “when he was finally going to be someone to make my family proud,”he said in his own words in an interview on the CBS television channel, the unpredictable happened: he was reproved during the tests.

It was not that the blind person was not well prepared: after passing all the tests of history, news and English, they asked him to read a sentence. Lucio Delgado is completely blind, there is no way he cannot read if it is not under the world-famous braille system.

When he asked the immigration officials for such an alternative, even though it was more than obvious that the man did not see anything, the agents told him that they did not have that possibility and offered him a new role … in larger letters!

Afterward, he had only the option of returning to the examination with a medical letter from a specialist that confirmed that his blindness was true. Without health insurance and with few resources, Luis Delgado could not afford it … And a letter from USCIS confirmed that his citizenship had finally been rejected since "Unfortunately, he was not able to read a sentence in English …"

Thanks to his cases, many people now question how the immigration program that USCIS uses looks at disabled people. "I never thought that they would never offer me the possibility of doing tests in something as basic as the braille system, it was a great surprise," the Mexican told the Washington Post.

Luis Delgado's lawyer reported that USCIS offered him a new appointment after his story was leaked to the media, and an immigration representative assured the Washington Post that since November last month, Braille tests have been offered for the blind. What a relief!