ICAP, in partnership with Villanova Law Professor Leslie Book, represented several U.S. citizen children and their parents in a federal class-action lawsuit challenging the CARES Act’s exclusion of mixed-status families from pandemic relief. Under the original 2020 law, stimulus checks were denied to any household where one or both parents filed taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) instead of a Social Security Number. This policy effectively punished U.S. citizen children based solely on their parents’ immigration status, denying them the $500 per-child benefit intended to provide a lifeline during the COVID-19 economic crisis.
Plaintiffs argued that this exclusion violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection by creating a discriminatory classification that harmed children based on their “alienage.” In June 2020, ICAP secured a significant procedural victory when a federal judge in the District of Maryland denied the government’s motion to dismiss, ruling that the children had standing to sue and that the case raised serious constitutional questions. This legal pressure, alongside similar ICAP-supported advocacy, contributed to a major legislative shift: In December 2020, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which retroactively expanded eligibility to mixed-status families and allowed U.S. citizen children to receive the stimulus funds they were previously denied.
