Fight for stimulus checks for couples of mixed immigration status ends with partial victory

    Dianne Solis The Dallas Morning News

    DALLAS — Aaron Jones lost his Dallas hotel analyst job as the coronavirus pandemic picked up speed. Jones was grateful when Congress passed a measure for $1,200 stimulus checks to taxpayers as part of the $2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill.
    Then, his gratitude evaporated.

    He was a U.S. citizen married to Vietnamese immigrant, Trinh Nguyen. The Dallas couple filed a joint tax return with his Social Security number and her individual taxpayer identification number, or ITIN, a government-established alternative for those without a Social Security number.

    That disqualified both of them from getting the initial stimulus checks. Fast forward to this December: Congress has just reached agreement on a second stimulus measure.

    This time, Jones is covered, but his wife isn’t. Those with Social Security numbers will receive a $600 stimulus check, half the individual amount of the first round.

    “It’s better than nothing but wildly insufficient in proportion to the actual problems,” Jones said.

    “Widespread economic recovery will not occur until the summer. However, Congress continues to under-deliver with a piecemeal approach.”

    Immigrants are stigmatized, said Jones, whose wife is a legal U.S. resident.

    The exclusion in the CARES Act penalized couples that filed with both an SSN and an ITIN. That exclusion also included mixed status families with U.S.-born children who would have otherwise been eligible for $500 as a dependent child under the age of 17.

    In the second relief measure of $900 billion, which awaits the signature of President Donald Trump, those with Social Security numbers will be eligible for the stimulus checks. But taxpayers using ITINs will still be excluded.

    “It is outrageous what has happened to these families in being left out of the first CARES Act,” said Juan Carlos Cerda, a business outreach manager with the Texas chapter of the American Business Immigration Coalition.

    But getting about an estimated 3.5 million persons who have Social Security numbers covered in the new round is to be applauded, said Cerda, who organized rallies in Dallas to draw attention to the issue. Such coverage will inject an additional $2.1 billion into local economies, the American Business Immigration Coalition said.

    The business group singled out efforts by Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, for pushing the issue forward on behalf of the U.S. citizens who had been penalized. The new bill, more than 5,000 pages long, will provide for retroactive payments under the first relief measure to mixed-status families with taxpayers holding a Social Security number, said the business immigration coalition.

    The exclusions were damned as a “marriage penalty” as word spread in March on mixed-status families being locked out of stimulus checks. Families around the country from Texas to Alaska rallied for a fix. Feisty Facebook groups organized. A federal class action lawsuit was filed in August in Maryland by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, saying the CARES Act was out to “humiliate” mixed status couples and their U.S.-born citizen children and that it unconstitutional discrimination.

    “At times of great crisis, our nation should come together in unity to recognize shared sacrifice and mutual challenge,” said Thomas Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. “The CARES Act regrettably did the opposite, by singling out for exclusion some of the families who have faced the worst hardship.”

    The impact is significant: 14.4 million people live in mixed-status families, according to the D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute. That includes 5.1 million who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants, the research nonprofit said.

    Of all those excluded, 2.3 million live in Texas and 4 million live in California.

    Nine months into the pandemic, the brutality of the coronavirus increases the stakes.

    About 17 million people have become infected by COVID-19 in the U.S. More than 313,000 have died.

    Martin Schrick had hoped for $2900 in stimulus relief in March for himself, his Costa Rican-born wife and their U.S.-born son. But like others left out, his wife is still in the process of getting legal permanent residency and has no Social Security number yet.

    She filed her taxes using an ITIN. The family got nothing.

    Now, he’ll be receiving $1,200 in checks in the second relief package — a $600 check for himself and a $600 check for his son. But Schrick said he is still disappointed that his Costa Rican wife won’t receive a check, too.

    “The average American doesn’t understand. They say, ‘You aren’t American, You shouldn’t get stimulus money.’ But what about these mixed status couples? I’ve been paying taxes for 40 years,” says the information technology specialist at the University of Pittsburgh.

    As for Jones in Dallas, he was able to get $600 a week in unemployment benefits under other emergency measures until the end of July. That’s been scaled back in the second relief package to $300, which he says will help him pay the rent.

    Finding a job in the hospitality industry has been impossible and Jones is trying for other positions. His wife is a full-time college student.

    She now has a Social Security number, and he tried to amend their tax return only to get a dreaded “error message.”

    “It is very frustrating,” Jones said. “I am a U.S. citizen and my wife is a permanent resident. We waited over a year with the (Department of Homeland Security) to get her into the country and paid exorbitant fees to get her in.”

    “They specifically went out of the way when they wrote the legislation to single us out, without any caveats,” Jones said.

    “Luckily pandemics are once in a lifetime events. The last one was 100 years ago. I won’t be around the next one. I’m 37.”