Sutich v. Callahan

On 27 March 1997, a group of attorneys filed a class-action suit before Judge Susan Illston in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff's legal counsel, led by Judith Z. Gold and others in the San Francisco firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, came form the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Protection & Advocacy Inc., and a variety of other groups representing minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and the disabled. The suit named its defendant John J. Callahan, Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who was being sued in his official capacity. Specifically, the plaintiffs charged that by cutting off their SSI benefits, the Social Security Administration had sought to abridge their Fifth Amendment rights to due process, seeking a declaratory judgment to this effect.

Gold and the other attorneys devoted the majority of their brief to examining a representative group of plaintiffs in order to illustrate the vast human suffering caused by Section 402. The case engendered empathy for those who would suffer from the cuts. However, it was framed in an appeal that questioned the logic of cost-cutting. All five of the named plaintiffs were lawful residents of the United States prior to the 22 August 1996 enactment of the Welfare Reform Act but were unable to obtain citizenship for reasons closely tied to their eligibility for SSI benefits. Each of the plaintiffs had been denied benefits within 65 days of the filing of the lawsuit, or would be denied such benefits on or before 22 August 1997.

At the center of the plaintiffs' brief was a series of five dossiers, portraits of representative persons affected by the SSI cuts. Two came from eastern or central Europe, two from east Asia, and one from central Asia. Two were refugees from communist regimes, two more emigrated from countries on the borders of communist countries, and a fifth came from a nation with a historically anti-American tradition. All had migrated to America seeking a better life in one way or another, and several were allowed into the country due to specific congressional measures regarding political asylum. Each was disabled in some way, and unable to support himself or herself without SSI assistance.

First among the named plaintiffs was 67-year-old Ivo Sutich. He had made what his attorneys called "a daring escape" from Marshal Tito's Communist Yugoslavia in 1954, and had entered the United States through the Department of State's Escapee Program two years later. A decade later, Sutich was diagnosed a with mental illness, and involuntarily institutionalized in a California mental-health facility. Following his discharge, Sutich applied for SSI benefits in December of 1996. In addition to his mental illness and his age, he was also legally blind. Sutich was ineligible for the program because he was not a U.S. citizen. "Naturalization," the attorneys noted, "is not a meaningful solution for Mr. Sutich." Given his mental illness, they argued, it was unlikely he would be accepted for citizenship. Denial of the SSI benefits would likely force him to an existence on the streets, if not a state mental institution.

Saman Muy, another refugee from a communist regime, was a 16-year-old Cambodian girl who was paralyzed from the chest down from the age of three. She and her parents escaped their native Cambodia four years after the Vietnamese ousted the repressive Pol Pot regime. Each day she received nine different medications, and required assistance using the bathroom, entering and leaving the apartment building where her family lived, and undertaking other activities of daily life. With the entire family confined to a one-bedroom apartment, and with the high cost of Saman's upkeep, the elimination of SSI benefits rendered the entire Muy family's future uncertain. Again, naturalization was "not a meaningful solution." As a minor, Saman was dependent on her parents to apply for citizenship, both of whom had been denied citizenship. Her stepfather was denied on the basis of mental disorders stemming from his experiences in war-torn Cambodia and her mother was denied because she could not speak English.

Wing Yim Chan, a 60-year-old who immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong, seemed to represent an immigrant's version of the American dream gone bad. Having worked for seven years as a seamstress in a garment factory, she had begun to suffer vision problems as a result of eye strain associated with the work. Unsuccessful eye surgery had left her blind in 1995, and her employer had fired her. Other named plaintiffs included Roshanak Partovi, who had come from Iran in 1987 and was later diagnosed with breast cancer, and Maria Klein, who had immigrated from Germany in 1957 and had been repeatedly institutionalized for chronic paranoid schizophrenia.