More than 1 million U.S. citizens including frontline workers in hospitals, police departments and public transportation, will not receive stimulus checks because they are married to taxpaying immigrants who don’t have Social Security numbers.
The government’s CARES Act gives $1,200 to U.S. citizens earning up to $75,000 in adjusted gross income who have a Social Security number. But it blocks U.S. citizens if they file a joint tax return with a spouse who does not have a Social Security number, effectively excluding millions of taxpaying immigrants and their citizen spouses.
Some U.S. citizens are fighting back, signing petitions and suing Trump for disenfranchising the spouses of the citizen community.
It’s a move that’s “really, really targeted to hurt,” said Randall Emery, president of American Families United, a nonprofit that advocates for U.S. citizens married to immigrants, in an LA Times interview. “It’s such a basic thing that the government would protect its own citizens and the government is really abandoning U.S. citizens when they need help the most. A lot of people really need this just to survive.”
“It’s the biggest slap in face that the government left us out,” said a citizen in the Midwest who files taxes jointly with her husband, a Mexican citizen from Guadalajara. “It’s already such a stressful time. This just increases the stigma and feeling of shame. It feels like a very big betrayal.”
A Houston mom has started a petition and hopes to get the attention of government officials in Washington, D.C., KHOU-TV reported.
“When the government decided to disenfranchise the immigration community, they didn’t hurt them. They hurt the people around them. This includes American citizens,” she said. You can check out her petition here.
An Illinois man is suing Trump and other high-ranking Republicans for denying stimulus checks to U.S. citizens who are married to immigrants who don’t have social security numbers, Fox reported.
The suit claims that plaintiff and others like him have been discriminated against solely on the basis of whom they chose to marry.
“It’s a deliberately cruel carve-out,” said Manar Waheed, senior legislative and advocacy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, in the lawsuit.
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The lawsuit says families that file jointly with one spouse having an Individual Taxpayer Identification number instead of a Social Security number are excluded from the CARES Act, unless one of the spouses is in the military.
This is not the first economic stimulus package that excludes citizens married to immigrants.
In 2008, many were penalized when Congress passed an economic-stimulus package that gave tax rebate checks to most taxpayers but excluded citizens whose foreign spouses lacked a Social Security number, LA Times reported.
