While Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) doesn’t give legal status to undocumented youth, it allows them to do things that, frankly, many of us who are U.S. citizens take for granted.
Under DACA, immigrant youth are able to work legally. They’re able to apply for driver’s licenses. They don’t have to live in constant fear of being deported. Most importantly, it allows them to strive for their dreams, and that can include higher education and entrepreneurship, which in turn can mean applying for a loan. While denying a loan based on citizenship status violates federal law, a class action lawsuit from a group of DACA recipients accuses Wells Fargo, already in a shitload of recent controversy, of doing just that.
Wells Fargo attempted to have the lawsuit thrown out on a technicality. A judge said nope:
A federal judge in San Francisco has refused to dismiss a lawsuit accusing Wells Fargo bank of denying loans to immigrants who came to the U.S. as youngsters and have been allowed to remain here.
Denial of loans based on citizenship status violates a federal law, passed in 1870, and a California civil rights law, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney said Thursday in rejecting the bank’s attempt to dismiss the proposed nationwide class-action suit.
Wells Fargo, according to the suit, has a policy of granting loans only to U.S. citizens or to noncitizens who have become permanent legal residents and have a cosigner who is a U.S. citizen.
“Every day I consider not completing my education because I don't have the means,” said Mitzie Perez, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. According to the Los Angeles Times, Perez “applied for a student loan from Wells Fargo last year to help cover the costs of her education but was not able to proceed with the online loan application after she disclosed she was not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, according to the lawsuit. She said she works and has used credit cards to cover her tuition.”
“This is a very significant ruling,” said the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Victor Viramontes. “Wells Fargo argued that they could discriminate against DACA recipients, and the judge rejected that.”
In seeking dismissal of the suit, the bank argued that its policy was allowed by a 1976 federal law, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which prohibits discrimination in lending based on race, sex, religion or national origin but does not mention citizenship.
But Chesney said the 1976 law did not repeal additional protections of an 1870 statute — enacted mainly to protect Chinese immigrants in California — that required businesses such as lenders to grant equal contract rights to “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States.” That meant they could not discriminate against noncitizens, she said.
For California residents, Chesney said, the federal credit law does not supersede the protections of the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which requires businesses to provide equal treatment to all customers and clients, regardless of their immigration status.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Wells Fargo also argued that “noncitizens might not be good credit risks because they might not remain in the U.S.” It’s true that the future of up to 800,000 DACA recipients remains up in the air due to Republican attacks, but with a U.S. citizen cosigner, “the judge said .. the cosigner would remain responsible for repayment.” What this lawsuit really illuminates is the enormous economic, artistic, and social contributions young immigrants make to our country. Human costs aside, studies say that if Donald Trump were to end DACA, it would mean a loss of more than $460 billion dollars in our nation’s GDP in just the first decade alone.