Immigrant Food Stamp Ban Voided

SACRAMENTO —  In one of the first legal setbacks for the new federal welfare law in California, a Sacramento Superior Court judge struck down a state directive Thursday that denies food stamps to legal immigrants who applied for the benefit after Sept. 22.

Advocates for the poor said the ruling by Superior Court Judge John R. Lewis gives thousands of poor legal immigrants throughout California a brief window of time to apply for and receive federal food stamps.

Lewis signed the temporary restraining order after ruling that the Wilson administration had violated state law by ordering the denial of food stamps without first holding public hearings and then issuing regulations outlining how its directive was to be implemented.

As a result, the judge said counties were confused and unable to clearly determine who should be allowed to get food stamps.

“The focus of what we were trying to do is require an orderly, public process and not have the governor or the administration unilaterally trying to implement this new law behind everybody’s back,” said Curtis Child, an attorney for Northern California Lawyers for Civil Justice, which filed the court action.

Gov. Pete Wilson, responding in a written statement, predicted that the judge’s order would be short-lived. He said the state had already begun procedures to issue the regulations and hoped to have them in place within 10 days.

In the meantime, Bob Campbell, assistant chief counsel for the California Department of Social Services, said the ruling would be appealed.

Although the decision was a clear victory for advocates for the poor, the two sides disagreed on its impact.

Campbell said it would leave each county to interpret the new federal law for itself and heighten the confusion over its requirements.

“The effect of the court’s order is that the counties are left without specific instructions on how to implement federal law,” he said, “so you’re left with counties interpreting 58 different ways what the federal law means.”

But Child insisted that the decision precluded the counties from taking any action under the federal legislation and required them instead to handle each application according to rules that were in place before the law passed.

If applicants meet the income test, he said, they should be entitled to food stamp benefits as long as the order is in place.

He said he did not know how many people might be affected but estimated it would be thousands.

The food stamp program, which is financed by the federal government but administered by the state, is designed to protect the poor from starvation by issuing vouchers or stamps that they can exchange at grocery stores for food.

In California, 3.2 million people receive food stamps and 467,000 of them are legal immigrants. The maximum monthly benefit for each recipient is $120.

The mammoth federal overhaul of welfare that was signed into law Aug. 22 by President Clinton included provisions that make poor legal immigrants ineligible for food stamps unless they are veterans, are refugees living in the United States less than five years or have worked in this country for at least 10 years.

Legal immigrants already getting food stamps can continue receiving them until April 1, when it is expected that about 350,000 will be excluded.

But the Wilson administration tried to cut off new applicants for food stamps when it advised each county in a letter to deny legal immigrants’ applications for the stamps as of Sept. 22.

Child said he is not challenging the federal law but the way in which the state has chosen to implement it.

The directions to counties were so vague, he said, that they had caused many local governments to refuse immigrants food stamps even though they were entitled to them.

He said counties were automatically denying benefits to legal immigrants who said they had worked in the United States for 10 years but had no documentation, because the state did not make it clear how to treat those cases.

He cited the case of Miguel Melgar as being typical of the kind of applicant who was likely to be denied food stamps because the state had not given counties any guidance for dealing with his circumstances.

He said Melgar had worked for eight years at a Sizzler steakhouse in Los Angeles, but was laid off a month ago when the restaurant closed. Although he has legally lived and worked in the United States for 13 years, Melgar only can document nine years of that employment, Child said.

He said Melgar meets the income test for food stamps because he now has no source of income to support his wife and three children, ages 5, 4, and 3 weeks, all of whom are American citizens.

To bolster his arguments, Child submitted a letter from the County Welfare Directors Assn. that complained that the state’s instructions “are in places vague, subject to misinterpretation and in at least one instance contained information inconsistent with federal law.”

Lawyers for the state argued that because the new federal law required almost immediate implementation of some of its provisions, California was not required to issue formal regulations.

If the state took time to issue the regulations, they said, it could be criticized by the federal government for delaying the implementation of the new welfare law.