110 undocumented Racine families nearly became homeless during pandemic. Here's how a local nonprofit helped them

The Journal Times - 10/13/2020

Oct. 12--RACINE -- Living in Racine is a mother of 5. She came here two years ago by way of Texas, which she left after escaping from the father of her children, who had tried to kill her. A cousin of hers had been living in Racine. But when she got here, the cousin had apparently left.

Time passed. She found a place to live and get settled. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. She couldn't get a job.

More than 150 million stimulus checks have been sent out to U.S. citizens during the pandemic. More than 30 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits in just the past few months, including hundreds of thousands of people in Wisconsin. This woman couldn't get that.

As an undocumented immigrant, she was barred from access to much of the aid the government was offering during the pandemic, aid that has proven to be a limited but stabilizing lifeline during seemingly unprecedented times.

She ended up falling three months behind on her rent, "had utility bills that were just piling up," and was struggling to afford food for herself and her kids.

To help out

A PayPal donation link and more information about Racine Interfaith Coalition's Racine Immigrant Support Initiative can be found at racineimmigrantsupport.com.

But then she got help. She and about 110 other undocumented households in and around Racine did, thanks to $39,000 in donations collected in just a few months by a local organization not used for fundraising.

That much money was raised, and that many families were helped, without a massive press campaign or news coverage. The campaign spread through word of mouth almost entirely, according to Jessica Diaz, who is co-heading the Racine Immigrant Support Initiative -- the name given to the program helping local immigrant households, which is run through the Racine Interfaith Coalition, of which Diaz is a member.

On Sunday, Diaz recounted this woman's story and others' who have been helped in recent months by the RIC during the nonprofit's annual fundraiser banquet.

Finding people, helping them

Diaz is an immigrant herself. She came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 6, grew up in Kenosha and has lived in Racine for 13 years. She works at a law firm and is pondering pursuing a law degree of her own. "The world needs more lawyers, good lawyers," she laughed during a Sunday interview with The Journal Times.

With her innate connections to the local immigrant community, people started knocking on Diaz's door, asking for help. They were desperate. The same thing was happening with Maria Morales, who co-leads the Racine Immigrant Support Initiative along with Diaz. The women joked about setting up queue lines at their homes for all the people stopping by, asking for help or requesting aid on behalf of someone else they know.

RIC Co-President Linda Boyle said, a few weeks ago, they were considering shutting the program down when money started running dry. "But then another $2,000 came in. Then another $200 came in." The need for help continued in the community. So did the generosity.

The effect of the nearly $40,000 in donations is obvious to those leading the initiative. "We've been able to keep people in their homes," Boyle said plainly, whether it's by directly helping pay for rent or covering grocery costs for a few weeks or paying off utility bills. And most families have received only one payment, and never more than $1,000.

"When you talk about living paycheck to paycheck, we have people in our community living day to day," Diaz added.

"These are people who couldn't get help from the government," Tammy Hayward, RIC's other co-president, said of those who received money from the RIC. The RIC is a nonprofit that normally only does advocacy work and rarely gets involved in direct charity like it has during the pandemic.

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The Racine Immigrant Support Initiative has proven to be a sticky and effective idea, with equitable programs being set up in Waukesha, Kenosha and Eau Claire, each of which have been successful at keeping people in their homes by follow the RIC's model, according to David Liners, executive director of WISDOM, a statewide network of mostly religious grassroots organizations of which RIC was a founding member.

"We have a lot of needy people" in Wisconsin, Boyle said. "It (the Racine Immigrant Support Initiative) spread from us to other areas of the state."

A wider look

In March, when many states (like Wisconsin) and much of the country started locking down as the coronavirus began spreading in the U.S. Soon after that, talks about stimulus checks and unemployment benefits started being discussed by government leaders. In April, the leaders of RIC started realizing that government aid was likely going to not help undocumented immigrants much.

"As much as this is a miserable time for all kinds of people, it's been even harder on our immigrant community ... especially considering the really limited lifeline the government gave out," Liners said.

Liners pointed out that most undocumented immigrants still pay sales tax, income tax and make many other contributions to governmental revenue, but don't often receive all of the benefits compared to U.S. citizens.

Immigrants in the U.S. -- regardless of if they are documented -- have been suffering among the worst effects of the novel coronavirus itself due to lack of access to health care, more crowded living situations and lack of economic stability which led to more workers continuing to work despite unsafe conditions, among other factors, according to research from the Baylor College of Medicine. The IRS has estimated that undocumented immigrants collectively pay about $9 billion in payroll taxes per year

Vermont's state government set aside $5 million last month in order to give $1,200 to the state's thousands of undocumented adults after the federal CARES Act left undocumented immigrants out of its stimulus funding. California passed a similar provision

in May with a price tag of $125 million, although the one-time benefit would be limited to $1,000 per household. California's plan was also largely funded through donations and philanthropy.

There have also been issues created by the federal government's CARES Act stimulus rules that disallowed adults who are U.S. citizens from getting aid if they were married to someone who isn't.

Under the federal rules passed created for who is eligible to receive stimulus checks, only households where every taxpaying adult has a social security number could get stimulus checks. So even if, for example, a U.S. citizen would normally have been eligible but their spouse doesn't have a social security number, then no one in that household could legally receive a check. An exception to this clause was made for military families.

There's a Facebook group

devoted to supporting mixed-status families with 15,000 members, but it has largely been unsuccessful in its efforts to change how stimulus has been sent out.

In September, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) started making arrests of undocumented immigrants again after a monthslong pause during the early days of the pandemic. The Trump administration maintained that the focus was on arresting those with criminal records, but more than half of those removed from the country in January through April 2020

had no criminal records whatsoever, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Boyle claimed that these deportations could end up putting a greater strain on American resources, not only because of the costs associated with arresting and deporting those people, but also because the children of those who are deported -- many of whom were born here and are thus U.S. citizens -- could then end up costing the government more because they would no longer have a parent to look after them.

However, according to a 2017 study from the Center for Immigration Studies, "the average cost of a deportation is much smaller than the net fiscal drain created by the average illegal immigrant" by a magnitude of 6-to-1: a deportation costs around $10,854 while "the average lifetime net fiscal drain" on the U.S. government of each of those same immigrants, after factoring the taxes they pay, is $65,292.(tncms-asset)961fb3b4-dcd7-11ea-b2b8-00163ec2aa77[3](/tncms-asset)

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