Lawsuits Target U.S. Cuts in Aid for Immigrants

Asserting that hundreds of thousands of destitute and disabled people face imminent danger of losing their only means of support, a coalition of civil rights attorneys sued the federal government Wednesday to stop it from denying aid to legal immigrants.

In lawsuits filed in San Francisco and New York, advocacy groups sought federal court orders preventing the Social Security Administration from carrying out the mandates of a new welfare law that requires legal immigrants to be removed from the Supplemental Security Income program. The SSI program provides benefits for impoverished people who are blind, aged or disabled.

The law requires noncitizens to be removed from the program by Sept. 1.

The new welfare act violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution by drawing an “impermissible distinction” between U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States, the suits charged.

To allow the new law to remain in effect, the lawyers argued, would cause great suffering to fragile human beings who have neither the physical capacity nor the economic resources to support themselves.

“We think it’s clear under the Constitution that the government cannot discriminate against lawful immigrants through actions that basically prevent them from surviving at any level of human decency,” said Judith Z. Gold, the lead attorney in the California case.

But some law experts disagree.

“Congress distinguishes between citizens and legal immigrants all the time,” said Peter Reich, a professor at Whittier Law School. “It’s well within Congress’s power to make those distinctions, and they’ve made those distinctions for some time.”

In San Francisco, the class-action lawsuit was filed by the firm of Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe, the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups on behalf of legal immigrants in California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

Two separate lawsuits were filed in New York by the city’s Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and several public interest groups. Those suits also challenged the legality of food stamp cuts that will affect legal immigrants.

The three lawsuits represent the first constitutional challenges to provisions in the new welfare law that deny SSI benefits to legal immigrants. Of the 500,000 nationwide that are expected to be cut off from the benefits, 224,000 live in California and 100,000 of those reside in Los Angeles.

Thousands more who applied for SSI after the law went into effect have also been denied benefits because they weren’t citizens.

Social Security Administration spokesman Phil Gambino said he could not comment on the constitutional merit of the lawsuits. But unless the courts issue an injunction, the agency would have no choice but to implement the new requirements, he said.

“We can’t ignore the law,” Gambino said.

Gambino noted that despite President Clinton’s decision to sign the new welfare law in August, the administration has strongly opposed the SSI cuts. The Clinton administration is pushing for legislation to restore eligibility to about 60% of the legal immigrants who are slated to lose benefits, he said.

“The whole idea of welfare reform was that able-bodied people would be going to work,” Gambino said. “But these are people who by definition cannot return to work.”

Several individuals were named as plaintiffs in the lawsuits, and their personal stories were cited to illustrate the devastating impact of the cuts on immigrant families.

Among them was a Los Angeles woman, Roshanak Partovi, 64, who emigrated from Iran in 1987 to be with her husband, who was working in the United States. In December 1995, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and later underwent a mastectomy.

Last summer, as her condition worsened, her 65-year-old husband lost his job, the lawsuit said.

She then applied for SSI benefits but was turned down because she was not a citizen. The couple has since been surviving on unemployment benefits, which are about to run out. When that happens, Partovi said through an interpreter, the couple will have no means to pay their rent or buy food.

“You can’t know how terrible it is,” she said. “All the pressure you get from chemotherapy. The pain. The fatigue. And on top of everything you don’t have money to live on.”

But the constitutional challenge that Partovi is hoping will save her from homelessness is seen by several legal observers and attorneys in Gov. Pete Wilson’s office as difficult to win in the courts.

“It may be terrible policy, but under existing constitutional doctrine there’s no doubt that these restrictions are constitutional, and I have no doubt that the Supreme Court would uphold them on appeal,” said Peter Spiro, professor at Hofstra Law School in New York.

Sean Walsh, a spokesman for the governor, who is not a party to the suit, said the better way to deal with the issue is for legal immigrant advocates to join with the governor in pressuring Congress to restore benefits to the “most aged and infirm” rather than fight in the courts.

Gold disagreed, saying that she believed that there was ample precedent for the courts to declare the legal immigrant provisions of the new act unconstitutional. A key argument for her side will be that government cannot discriminate against a class of people in a way that denies them the subsistence benefits they need to survive, she said.

She said she also intends to argue that the congressional reasoning behind the cuts--to discourage illegal immigration and promote self-reliance--is irrational.

“Denying lawful permanent residents these benefits,” the San Francisco lawsuit said, “will make them less self-reliant since they will be in danger of becoming homeless, hungry and unable to care for themselves.”