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Immigration Snag Keeps Kidney Recipient From Medicine

POSTED: 7:23 am PDT July 28, 2005

SAN ANTONIO -- A San Antonio doctor who donated a kidney to a Honduran man is again fighting for the man's life.

This time, it's because U.S. immigration officials are preventing the kidney recipient from returning to the United States before his anti-rejection drugs run out.

The transplant patient, Isaias Arita-Bueso, returned to Honduras to visit his family for two weeks. But U.S. immigration officials turned him away when he tried to board a plane back to San Antonio on June 30. They said the patient's student visa was set to expire at the end of August.

Peter Speicher is the ophthalmologist who donated his kidney last August. He's trying to get more anti-rejection medicine to the man and get him back to the United States. He said that after the ordeal of donating a kidney, he's determined to keep the man from dying because of bureaucratic red tape.