THE TORCH: CONTENTSBy Holly Straut-Eppsteiner
APRIL 10, 2020

Across the United States, workers doing essential jobs continue reporting to them, keeping grocery shelves stocked and stores sanitized, laboring at construction sites, preparing and delivering packages to our doors, collecting trash and keeping communities clean, and harvesting and processing the food that keeps our supply chains running and our refrigerators stocked. Approximately six million essential workers are immigrants. Yet these workers, who are so integral to our collective health and survival during this unprecedented COVID-19 public health crisis, have been left without meaningful protections for their own health and safety on the job.

Retailers offer workers a patchwork of protections, with some offering masks and gloves, but some employers provide no protection for workers who are face-to-face with hundreds of customers each day. At least four people who worked at grocery stores already have died from COVID-19. Sanitation workers are picking up more trash than ever without masks. Construction workers have described an inability to wash their hands at work, working in cramped conditions, having to share tools, and lacking masks or gloves.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

Many farmworkers have not received additional protective gear or handwashing stations to protect themselves, have not received adequate information about the virus, and find it difficult to effectively distance themselves from coworkers while in the fields and in crowded housing. At meat and poultry processing plants, workers who labor shoulder-to-shoulder in frigid conditions have continued reporting to work when ill, to avoid receiving disciplinary points for calling in sick. Meat and poultry workers at plants across the South and West have contracted COVID-19, and four have died. Immigrants, women, and people of color disproportionately fill many of these low-wage jobs and find themselves at heightened risk of exposure to COVID-19 while at work.

Undocumented workers and their families are particularly vulnerable because they are unable to access safety-net programs that provide essential health care coverage and nutrition assistance. When employers lay off workers because of COVID-19, those who lack work authorization are ineligible for unemployment insurance even when they’ve paid taxes and their employers have paid into their state’s unemployment insurance system. Despite being taxpayers and filing tax returns, these workers will not receive stimulus payments.

From a health and safety perspective, undocumented workers face high rates of exposure to occupational hazards, but they do not receive higher pay to compensate for that risk relative to other workers. Moreover, their legal precariousness makes undocumented workers hesitant either to file claims when their rights as workers are violated or to demand protections.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act gives all workers the right to safe and healthful working conditions. Employers have a duty to ensure that workplaces are free of known hazards that could harm their employees. Yet while the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have offered employers guidance on COVID-19, no enforceable legal standard or regulation is in place to require employers to take certain minimum steps to protect workers who are on the frontlines of this crisis and risking their health and safety every day. Now more than ever we need policymakers to guarantee that policy responses are inclusive of all our community members — including immigrants.

In the absence of employers or government taking the necessary steps to ensure the safety and health of frontline workers at their jobs, workers have begun to take action on their own. At poultry plants in Virginia and Georgia, workers walked off the job because they fear being exposed to COVID-19 in unsanitary and unsafe working conditions and lack personal protective equipment. In Pittsburgh, sanitation workers went on a wildcat strike to protest lack of protective equipment and to demand hazard pay. Bus drivers planned a strike in Birmingham, Alabama, and a sickout in Detroit.

McDonald’s employees in San Jose, Calif., walked out because “they didn’t even have enough soap to clean their hands.” Whole Foods workers across the country held a sickout demanding paid leave and hazard pay. One thousand meatpacking workers in Colorado walked off the job after ten workers tested positive for COVID-19. These responses reveal the power workers — including immigrants — have when they act together to demand better and safer workplaces.

These bold actions demonstrate the need for the government to act now to protect the people who make up our essential workforce. The federal response to COVID-19 should include reforms that recognize immigrants’ contributions during an unprecedented crisis. All workers deserve to be treated with dignity and have safe and sanitary working conditions so they can go to work each day without fear of risking their lives. Workers have an urgent need for an OSHA standard that provides a legal safeguard requiring employers to take critical steps that will keep workers and their families safe as they keep the country running.

More information about workers’ rights related to COVID-19, including how workers can take action to protect themselves, can be found in “FAQ: Immigrant Workers’ Rights and COVID-19,” published by the National Immigration Law Center, the National Employment Law Project, and the OSH Law Project.

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Holly Straut-Eppsteiner is NILC’s Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and research program manager.

THE TORCH: CONTENTSBy Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec
APRIL 3, 2020 [*]

In response to the COVID-19 public health crisis, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has clarified its process for handling Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewal requests. According to USCIS’s website, its offices will remain closed at least until June 4.

The Home Is Here campaign’s Informing DACA Recipients and Practitioners Working Group, composed of advocates and immigration legal service providers, has updated guidance for DACA renewal requestors in light of USCIS’s clarified process, which will remain in place while USCIS offices remain closed.

 

Here’s what you should know:

1. “Wet signatures” (your non-photocopied signature, which you wrote with a pen) are temporarily not required on renewal applications. A person requesting DACA renewal may work with their attorney electronically (for example, using email and video or telephone conferencing) to complete their application, which can then be sent to USCIS by mail, since neither the applicant’s nor the attorney’s signature has to be “wet”; rather, it can be a copy of a signature on a form that was scanned, then emailed or faxed.

2. Request for Evidence (RFE) and Notice of Intent to Deny (NOID) deadlines have been extended.

3. USCIS may now use previously done biometrics to process work permit (employment authorization) renewal requests.

We can’t know for sure how USCIS’s office closures will affect the processing of DACA renewal requests, but we expect this closure may affect processing times. If you decide to apply now, we encourage you to send your application via certified mail to have proof of postmark date and confirmation of when your application arrived to a USCIS lockbox. For more information, we encourage you to read this guidance from Home Is Here.

Nobody knows what will happen with DACA in the next few weeks and months. We are still expecting a Supreme Court decision on the DACA cases by the end of the June 2020, but we don’t know when or how the Court will rule. The COVID-19 pandemic creates an additional layer of fear and uncertainty. Tens of thousands DACA recipients are on the frontlines responding to COVID-19, according to a new Center for Migration Studies report, and they’re unsure if they’ll be able to keep their jobs in a range of fields, including health care, transportation, warehousing, retail, pharmacies, and waste management, if the Court’s ruling leads to the end of DACA.

Advocates and some governors, such as Colorado governor Jared Polis, have asked Congress and the Trump administration to automatically extend work permits to alleviate the stress many are experiencing right now.

In the meantime, for DACA recipients, it feels like it did in June through August 2012, the three months between the announcement and implementation of DACA. During that period, we had some questions answered by USCIS but didn’t know what the program would be like moving forward, and we relied on practitioners with years of experience in other areas of immigration, such as temporary protected status (TPS), for guidance. We learned by doing. We learned by monitoring how USCIS was handling DACA requests and the experiences of our clients, so we’ll do the same now, given these new changes, and share any insights we learn along the way.

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Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec is NILC’s immigration policy advocate.

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* This article was updated on May 29, 2020, in the following way: In the first paragraph, the date until which USCIS offices will remain closed was changed from “until at least May 3” to “at least until June 4,” based on information on the USCIS webpage to which the phrase hyperlinks.

THE TORCH: CONTENTSBy Avideh Moussavian and Manar Waheed
APRIL 2, 2020

Congress’s third bill addressing the impacts of COVID-19, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, was a necessary attempt to respond to this public health crisis, but its exclusion of immigrant communities is downright racist and xenophobic. Immigrants were cut out of provisions to ensure COVID-19 testing and care as well as economic relief, undermining our collective safety and economic future. COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate; Congress’s response shouldn’t either. It’s essential that another bill — one that encompasses everyone — be introduced and passed as soon as possible.

There are three major ways in which immigrants were left behind in the CARES Act: testing and care, cash rebates, and unemployment insurance. If recent weeks have highlighted anything, it is just how interdependent we are in confronting a virus that does not discriminate. Our country’s ability to contain this pandemic and the sustainability of our future depends on Congress closing the gaps created by the relief bills enacted to date. Immigrants are serving so many vital roles at the frontlines of our recovery from COVID-19, including the 1.7 million immigrant medical and health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients and the 27,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients working as doctors, nurses, and paramedics. It is both irresponsible and morally unforgivable to pass relief bills that fail to recognize that every person’s health and financial stability are critical.

In its next bill, Congress first must ensure that everyone who needs it receives testing and treatment. This should not even be up for debate. Yet the second COVID-19 relief package, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (Families First Act), left out tens of millions of people — including DACA recipients, people with temporary protected status (TPS), certain survivors of crimes (people with U visas), undocumented people, and many lawful permanent residents (people with “green cards”). This bill includes money to support testing for those who are uninsured and not covered by Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Affordable Care Act marketplace, or any other individual or group health plan, but it kept immigrant eligibility restrictions in place.

The Families First Act should have made COVID-19–related services available under emergency Medicaid, so that it would not include the same immigrant eligibility restrictions as nonemergency Medicaid. It should also have ensured that these services would not be counted against a person in assessments of whether they are likely to become a “public charge,” which are effectively wealth tests of people seeking admission to the U.S. as lawful permanent residents or on an immigrant visa.

Unfortunately, both the Families First Act and CARES Act fail to address these gaps, leaving out tens of millions of people from testing and treatment. Some states, such as New York, are including COVID-19 testing, evaluation, and treatment as a part of emergency Medicaid coverage. Community health centers may also help fill this gap. But they may not be able to and shouldn’t have to — the federal response must be as holistic as possible in developing a national policy.

Second, Congress must include all immigrant workers and tax filers in the tax rebate so people can receive vital cash assistance. In the CARES Act, Congress funded cash rebates for recent tax filers based on their taxpayer identification numbers, but limited this to those using Social Security numbers (SSNs). However, many people file their tax returns using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). Under the bill, if ITIN users file jointly with a spouse or child with an SSN, everyone in the household will be denied access to the cash assistance. While Congress did create an exception to allow military families to be able to use an ITIN number, this narrow exception only demonstrates that members of Congress understood that they created this cruel carveout and still deliberately chose to leave out millions. As a result, many immigrant workers are put in an increasingly difficult position, cut out of cash assistance and risking their health for essential work without even having access to testing and care.

Third, the bill must provide unemployment insurance for as many people as possible during this crisis. Under federal law, individuals must be work-authorized both for the period of time for which they are claiming unemployment insurance and at the time of filing their claim. However, many immigrant workers awaiting adjudication of immigration benefits or at risk of the looming threat of a loss of immigration status may experience a lapse in their work authorization — perhaps due to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office closures during this crisis. Congress should ensure an automatic extension of work permits for people with DACA or TPS and nonimmigrant visas for the same duration of time as a regular renewal of that work permit, i.e., a two-year extension for DACA recipients. Exacerbating financial hardship will likely make it impossible for these workers and community members to survive, thus harming our short- and longterm recovery efforts.

Congress can and must take up another relief bill to address these significant gaps in order to ensure the well-being of people, families, and communities across the country — and for the future of our nation. And they need to do it now.

RESOURCES

• There may be other options for testing and care. While many immigrants have been left out of the relief packages thus far, there are some options available for immigrants to get tested and treated for COVID-19. Community health centers provide health care to all patients regardless of immigration status typically at a reduced cost or free of charge. Find the closest health center to you at https://findahealthcenter.hrsa.gov/. Call the community health center prior to going in person to ensure they are providing COVID-19 testing and care.

• Testing and care will not impact immigration benefits. USCIS recently posted an alert notifying the public that it will not consider testing, treatment, or preventive care related to COVID-19 of noncitizens as a public charge, so such assistance should not impact their Lawful Permanent Residency or visa applications.

• Immigration enforcement should not take place at or near health care facilities. On its “Guidance on COVID-19” website, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stated, “Individuals should not avoid seeking medical care because they fear civil immigration enforcement.” ICE will not carry out enforcement operations “at or near health care facilities such as hospitals, doctors’ offices, accredited health clinics, and emergent or urgent care facilities, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” per the agency’s previously issued sensitive locations memo and reiterated public statement on March 18, 2020. As always, it’s important to know your rights. Learn more about your rights here.

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Avideh Moussavian is legislative director for advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center. Manar Waheed is senior legislative and advocacy counsel at the ACLU.

THE TORCH: CONTENTSBy NILC Staff
APRIL 1, 2020

Today, NILC published a policy brief summarizing the impact that key provisions of recently enacted COVID-19 relief legislation — federal legislation — will have on low-income immigrant communities. Our policy brief focuses on access to health care, economic supports, and employment protections.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a $2 trillion economic relief bill, builds on the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) to provide economic relief and health care options amidst the growing global COVID-19 public health crisis. Nevertheless, these bills fall short of meeting the most basic health care and economic needs of millions of Americans, including immigrant workers and families who are on the frontlines caring for our communities by providing crucial services while others are able to shelter at home.

 

For example, the CARES Act builds on a provision of FFCRA that allows states to use their Medicaid programs to provide free testing to uninsured people. However, the FFCRA does not alter Medicaid eligibility for immigrants; therefore, many immigrants remain excluded under this option.

Likewise, the CARES Act provides for the issuance of an advanced Recovery Rebate to help taxpayers recover from the economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis. The maximum rebate amount is $1,200 for individuals and $2,400 for taxpayers filing taxes jointly. Unfortunately, the bill excludes many immigrant and mixed–immigration status families from receiving this financial assistance.

The current global public health crisis is a reminder of how interconnected we all are — and how our collective health and well-being are thoroughly interdependent. COVID-19 does not discriminate and neither should our public health response and economic relief efforts.

As Congress considers additional measures to bolster our economy and communities across the country, it must deliver relief that eliminates barriers to testing, diagnosis, and treatment and that supports other basic needs of low-income immigrants and their families.

Read the full policy brief.