Nearly 2.4 million people in Texas were shut out of federal relief by the Trump administration, San Antonio Express-News reports, including hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who are excluded from funds because they’re married to an immigrant.
The financial barriers come even as local prosperity in the state has been thanks in part to the labor of immigrants: “In Houston, immigrants are responsible for more than 26 percent of the area’s GDP, according to a study by New American Economy,” the report said.
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), an advocacy group with a regional office in Texas, has been among the groups that have sued the federal government over the denial of relief to mixed-status families. Under the CARES Act, only taxpayers who have a Social Security number are eligible for relief, shutting out immigrants who filed returns using an IRS-issued Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) as well as their U.S. citizen spouses if they filed joint returns.
”Among the U.S. citizens suing the federal government is Christina Segundo Hernandez, a Texas resident,” MALDEF said in a statement received by Daily Kos at the time of the lawsuit’s launch. “She filed her 2019 tax return with her husband, a construction worker, who has an ITIN. She recently learned that her family, which includes her four U.S.-born children, are blocked from receiving a recovery check.”
Now because of the federal government’s cruel policy, their family is at increased risk during this pandemic. "The federal government shouldn't be able to exclude some U.S. citizens from getting help because of the person they are married to," Segundo Hernandez said in the statement. "My husband and I pay taxes; I was born in this country. My children were born here, yet the U.S. government now wants to turn its back on me and treat me as if I'm not a citizen. That's wrong."
California, the state with the largest undocumented population in the nation, has established a fund to assist at least some of these families. In fact, demand was so high that phone lines for the nonprofit agencies tasked with handling applications were overloaded on the first day of the program. But Texas, home to the second largest undocumented population, has yet to take any such step—and likely won’t due to the governor’s own racist track record.
“People should not be punished because they don’t happen to have citizenship at a time when we have a pandemic that is impacting all of us,” Rep. Al Green told Express-News. “It’s just unthinkable we would deny children something because the father happened to be someone who is not a citizen.”