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Legal aid organizations call out to spread information to ethnic groups affected in the Bay Area
Many of these people – mostly who are vulnerable elders, people with disabilities and disproportionately from ethnic groups – will receive past benefits ranging from $10,000 to $40,000.
The landmark case, Martinez v. Astrue, was filed on behalf of lead plaintiff Rosa Martinez, 53, of Redwood City, CA, whose benefits were stopped when her name appeared in an arrest-warrant database.
One Florida plaintiff, he said, had a Texas warrant he didn’t know about because of a bounced $300 check he’d written years ago. The man’s warrant was classified as a felony instead of a misdemeanor because the state had not updated the old law to account for decades of inflation.In a briefing last Tuesday, July 27, at the New America Media in San Francisco, leading public-interest attorneys involved with the federal case appealed to the members of the media to get the word out to those affected."We rarely get the news from the government when it’s good news," said Gerald
McIntyre, Directing Attorney at the National Senior Citizens Law Center (NSCLC) in Los Angeles and lead counsel in the Martinez v. Astrue case. "This is a call to action to spread the good news. It depends on us to get the good news out to the people."In the case, the agency, headed by Social Security commissioner Michael J. Astrue, agreed in a Federal District Court settlement last Fall in Oakland to repay people whose Social Security, SSI or Special Veterans Benefits were withheld because their names appeared in an arrest-warrant database.
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