This past February, the woman, P., was placed on a flight to Nepal by authorities after the Interior Ministry determined it would not renew her work permit. She was expelled despite the fact that the Tel Aviv District Court had agreed two days earlier to her lawyer's request for an injunction, delaying the government's deportation order.
In addition to the woman's airplane ticket, the state also had to cover the costs involved in locating P., who lives in an isolated village in Nepal. Foreign Ministry officials toiled for days in their efforts to locate her.
P., a 30-year-old divorcee and mother of three children who live in Nepal, hails from a secluded village. Three days of travel are required to reach the village from the nearest large town. Her village is so inaccessible the Foreign Ministry had to transmit a message to the woman via a local radio station.
At the end of 2006, P. came to Israel alone to find work as a home caregiver. A year after her arrival, she contracted tuberculosis and was subsequently hospitalized for five months at Shmuel Harofeh Medical Center in Be'er Ya'akov.
After being released from the hospital, she continued to take medication. By mid-2008, her doctors determined that she had fully recovered from her illness and was fit to resume work.
During the time that she was ill, P.'s work permits expired. After she was cleared to return to work, she repeatedly tried to have her permit renewed, but was denied by Interior Ministry clerks.
P. needed to find work in order to renew her permit and remain in Israel. She also needed to repay a loan she had received from a job placement firm in Nepal. In August 2008, she was hired to look after an elderly man in Jerusalem. Three weeks later, the man passed away.
P. once again found herself without work and deprived of the option to renew her permit. She was soon hired by another family in Jerusalem, and then filed the requisite permit requests with the Interior Ministry.
According to her attorney, Yohana Lerman, P. pleaded with Interior Ministry officials, explaining to them that her illness had prevented her from obtaining a renewal before the original permit expired. She also sought aid from non-governmental organizations, including Kav La'Oved and Physicians for Human Rights, who intervened with the ministry on her behalf. These groups were told that P. was to be deported from the country without delay.
Two days after Lerman obtained a court injunction against the deportation, officers with the Interior Ministry's Oz immigration enforcement unit escorted P. to the airport, where they placed her on a plane back to Nepal.
"The conduct of the immigration authorities and the Oz unit in this case was Kafkaesque and idiotic," Lerman told Haaretz. "If the Interior Ministry would have followed its own procedures, we would have been spared this entire embarrassing saga."
"If someone had given P. an opportunity to call me or to allow her to appeal, I would have stopped the deportation," Lerman continued. "But everyone rushed the matter and were quick to put her on a plane."
Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz
