Federal Judge orders NYC to provide food stamps to immigrant women and children who have experienced violence

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff on Tuesday ruled that the state and city of New York cannot deny food stamps and other aid to immigrant women and children who have experienced violence, the New York Times reports.

The New York Legal Assistance Group and the Legal Aid Society -- representing a group of about one dozen women who were denied aid -- in December 2005 filed a lawsuit that seeks to give plaintiffs the money they allegedly are entitled to through their benefits, which range from a few hundred dollars to one or two thousand dollars per family.

"It is not the policy of the United States, nor of the state of New York, to leave destitute the battered immigrant wives and children of lawful U.S. residents just because their abusive husbands are no longer supporting them or providing them with a basis for obtaining aid," Rakoff wrote in his decision, adding that systematic problems with computer programs and training manuals need to be fixed, so that welfare workers do not reject aid to the women.

One of the original problems with the program was that the list of eligible immigration categories in a computer pull-down menu that caseworkers used when registering people for aid mistakenly omitted "battered qualified alien," which includes immigrant women and children.

The pull-down menu problem in February was rectified after Rakoff issued a partial injunction, but he said that policymakers were aware of the problems and did nothing to fix them until the lawsuit was filed, the Times reports.

In his decision, he wrote, "The simple truth ... is that the ameliorative actions now taken by the city and state defendants would not likely have been taken if this lawsuit had not been brought and had the court not issued its final injunction."

Rakoff, who certified the lawsuit as a class action suit and issued a preliminary injunction against New York state, said that if the city and state continue to fight the lawsuit, he will likely find them liable for "deliberate indifference" (Bernstein, New York Times, 8/30).