A new front has been opened in the battle by Caribbean immigrants to block deportation from the United States to their respective places of birth in the region.

And don't be surprised if more enterprising attorneys and their West Indian clients in New York, Miami, Boston and elsewhere who represent Haitians, Jamaicans, Antiguans, Kittitians, Guyanese, Barbadians, Bahamians, Trinidadians or Vicentians turn to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in increasing numbers for relief from U.S. immigration authorities, who are determined to send them back to their homelands because they are considered criminal aliens.

Already, the case of Andrea Mortlock, a Jamaican woman, is now before the little-known human rights body. She is fighting deportation to her birthplace on the grounds that as a HIV/AIDS victim, a return to the Caribbean nation where the medication she needs to stay alive isn't available free of charge, would be tantamount to imposing a death sentence.

The Commission was established 40 years ago as part of the Inter-American system, and while it has no enforcement powers and, therefore, can't legally prevent the United States from sending the Jamaican back home, a decision calling on the United States to allow the woman to stay would have considerable moral weight.

While the Commission, which is headed by a West Indian isn't out there beating the American bushes by soliciting cases against the United States, and although it has declined to suggest to people from the Caribbean and elsewhere should use it to prevent or delay deportations to Jamaica, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Barbados, Antigua and neighbors, a commission official in Washington told the CaribNews that it was, in fact, an appropriate forum for anyone in the Western hemisphere to use if they believe their human rights have been violated.

"It is our mandate to hear such deportation cases," a commission official in the U.S. capital said. "The Commission is open to citizens of all countries in North America, the Caribbean and Latin American. They certainly have the right to use the system in that way."

The official confirmed that the case of Mortlock, who served a year in prison in the 1980s for cocaine trafficking but is now battling to remain in the United States, was the first of its kind filed by a West Indian.

Mortlock, who came to the United States decades ago when she was a teenager, later became a cocaine addict and eventually contracted the deadly disease. She was convicted in 1987 of selling drugs to get money to feed her habit; she is arguing that the efforts to deport her to Jamaica are an abuse to her human rights because her country can't afford to provide her with the expensive drugs she needs to remain alive.

Indeed, her doctor, Gabriela Rodriguez-Caprio, has filed an affidavit with the commission, warning that without the medications and nutritional supplements the woman would suffer "a rapid progression" and would die.

But U.S. immigration authorities aren't impressed or moved by the argument.

"It is our legal obligation to carry out a removal order that has been issued by a federal judge," Tim Counts, a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement told a New York newspaper.

Mortlock, who is now being held in a detention center in New Jersey pending deportation, was in and out of federal immigration detention facilities since the early to mid 1990s. Indeed, she spent three years locked up and was released over the objections of federal authorities, when a judge held that indefinite detention – meaning more than six months – was permissible under the U.S. Constitution only if the detainee was dangerous.

She wasn’t considered a danger to herself or society.

But the mother of a 22-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, both U.S. citizens, isn't giving up her fight to stay and to live a longer life.

Even before she was detained on August 11, and sent to New Jersey, the woman had begun following a strict regimen of medication and was doing the kinds of things that would make her a productive member of society, including taking vocational courses.

As immigration officials remain firm that she must leave the country, and as one of Mortlock's attorneys, Olivia Cassin of the Legal Aid Society asks the key question: "How can you balance finality and an immigration case with someone's right to live," the Inter-American Human Rights Commission is preparing to study the case.