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Ruling Restores Lost Benefits to Immigrants
By Nina Bernstein, The New York Times
August 19, 2005
New York State cannot give low-income people who are elderly, blind and disabled less benefit money just because they are immigrants, even though the federal government has stopped paying its share, a state judge ruled in a decision released yesterday.
The decision restores higher aid payments to thousands of disabled legal immigrants, many of them elderly refugees who were facing eviction after being cut off from federal and state disability benefits because they had not become United States citizens within a seven-year period set by Congress.
"It's a complete and total victory," said Jennifer Baum, a Legal Aid Society lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs, after the ruling by Justice Jane S. Solomon of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. "It's a victory for New York State's constitution and a victory for elderly, frail and disabled immigrants who have been struggling to survive."
New York State will appeal the decision, "because of its severe fiscal impact on the state," said John Madden, a spokesman for the state's Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. The office's commissioner, Robert Doar, who is named as a defendant, is still calculating the potential cost, Mr. Madden said.
The coalition of lawyers for the poor who brought the class-action lawsuit last December estimate that the state will owe a total of less than $1.5 million in retroactive payments to 487 refugees cut off during the last two years, and as much as $3 million a year for 2,000 refugees likely to reach the cutoff at some point during the next six or seven years, unless Congress extends the aid.
The decision also makes the state liable for providing additional aid to other legal immigrants who are disabled or elderly but now considered for only the lowest level of public assistance, typically $352 a month.
A citizen in the same circumstances receives $666 monthly, the standard of need set by state law for the disabled. To reach that amount, the state adds $87 to what the federal government pays in federal Supplemental Security Income, or S.S.I.
That $314 difference, based only on their not yet being citizens, violates both the federal Constitution's guarantee of equal protection and the state Constitution's requirement that the state help the needy, Justice Solomon wrote, echoing a 2001 decision by New York's highest court that struck down a similar state restriction on nonemergency Medicaid coverage for the immigrant poor.
Since the lawsuit was filed, 10 of the 18 named plaintiffs who are refugees have become citizens and begun receiving their S.S.I. payments, but every month, new cases reach the time limit and are cut off, Ms. Baum said.
To Sura Simonova, 91, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, who is nearly blind and arrived in 1997 as a refugee from Ukraine, news of the victory seemed too good to be true. Mrs. Simonova, who shares a small $650 Brooklyn apartment with her 69-year-old disabled daughter, was still waiting for her citizenship interview when her S.S.I. benefits were cut off in June 2004. Her daughter, a citizen, continues to get S.S.I. benefits, but they cover just the rent, leaving only $352 to Mrs. Simonova for other expenses.
"We had a very tough time to survive," Mrs. Simonova said through an interpreter. "My daughter and I didn't have enough food or vitamins, and we could not even run air-conditioning when it was so hot because we didn't have enough money."
Mrs. Simonova passed her citizenship interview in February, but apparently her fingerprints have not yet cleared the Department of Homeland Security - a delay experienced by many applicants, according to Constance Carden, a lawyer with the New York Legal Assistance Group.
The decision brought joy to Sarah Rubin, who said she planned to communicate it to her frail, deaf parents in sign language. They were cut off from their S.S.I. benefits in July.
"They are 73 and 75," she said. "They are in the process of obtaining their citizenship, and it takes so long in New York now, and only because of this they were deprived of everything - all source of living including any money, medical coverage, food stamps, everything."
The state had argued in part that the immigrants had no right to be heard in court because the cutoff was the result of a political decision on benefits reached in Congress. It also contended that the immigrants had no independent right to aid at the level set by the state.
But Justice Solomon rejected that view, saying it would lead to "the perverse result" that the state would be providing extra money to people whose income was too high to qualify for federal S.S.I., while denying it to needier people solely because they were immigrants.
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