COVID-19 Relief and the SSN Line Drawn Through Immigrant Families
How the CARES Act keyed pandemic stimulus payments to a work-eligible Social Security number, excluding undocumented filers and the citizens who shared their households.
When Congress assembled the first wave of pandemic relief in March 2020, it built the centerpiece cash payments on a single eligibility key: a work-eligible Social Security number. That choice, embedded in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, drew a hard line through the country’s households. Undocumented immigrants were excluded as a matter of design, and so, for the better part of a year, were millions of U.S. citizens and lawful residents who happened to share a tax return with them. The relief checks became one of the clearest illustrations of how a facially neutral administrative rule can sort families by immigration status and leave whole households outside the safety net during a public-health emergency.
How the CARES Act drew the line
Section 2201 of the CARES Act created the Economic Impact Payment by adding section 6428 to the Internal Revenue Code. The payment was structured as an advance refundable tax credit of up to $1,200 per adult, $2,400 for a married couple filing jointly, plus $500 for each qualifying child, phasing out above $75,000 in adjusted gross income ($150,000 for joint filers). Eligibility turned on a defined term: to receive the credit, a taxpayer had to supply a “valid identification number,” which the statute defined as a Social Security number issued for work purposes.
That definition did two things at once. It excluded immigrants who file their federal taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, the credential the IRS issues precisely so that people without a Social Security number can still report income and pay tax. And, because the rule reached joint returns, it disqualified the entire couple whenever one spouse filed with an ITIN. A U.S. citizen who would plainly qualify on her own could lose the payment for herself and for her citizen children solely because her spouse lacked a work-eligible number. The statute carved out one narrow exception: where a spouse served in the armed forces during the year, a single Social Security number on the joint return sufficed.
Who was swept out, and how many
The reach extended well past the population the rule was nominally aimed at. Undocumented immigrants who pay taxes through ITINs were ineligible for themselves, but the joint-filing trap pulled in their citizen and lawful-permanent-resident family members too. Analysts who studied the provision estimated that the exclusion touched on the order of 14 million people living in mixed-status families, including several million U.S. citizens and lawful residents denied a payment because of a household member’s status.
The design also collided with how the immigrant tax base actually behaves. ITIN holders are, by definition, people filing returns and remitting payroll and income taxes, many of them in front-line and essential roles during the shutdowns. The statute thus withheld relief from a set of workers who were contributing to the same Treasury that was cutting the checks, a feature critics described as taxation without the corresponding benefit. For comparison, the same Congress had not always tied relief so tightly to immigration status; the broader question of who counts as a member of the community for purposes of a public benefit recurs across other areas of federal and state law.
The constitutional challenges
Litigation followed quickly. In Amador v. Mnuchin, filed in the District of Maryland, U.S. citizens married to ITIN filers argued that conditioning their own payments on their spouse’s immigration status violated the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, along with associated due-process and associational claims. The theory was that the rule treated one class of married citizens worse than all others for a reason untethered to the relief’s purpose, in effect penalizing them for whom they had married. The district court rejected the government’s threshold defenses, including its sovereign-immunity argument, and allowed the suit to proceed toward the merits in 2020.
A parallel theory animated suits brought on behalf of citizen children whose parents filed with ITINs, arguing that the children’s own statutory eligibility could not be stripped because of a parent’s status. The harder question in all of these cases was the standard of review. Classifications drawn around alienage can trigger heightened scrutiny, but the CARES rule did not sort the plaintiffs themselves by status; it sorted them by the status of a family member, and courts have generally given Congress wide latitude over the design of tax benefits and the appropriation of federal funds. Whether the dual-Social-Security-number requirement could survive even rational-basis review, given how loosely it fit any stated objective, remained contested and was not definitively resolved before Congress changed the rule.
One feature distinguished these challenges from other CARES disputes. The Social Security number condition was written into the statute by Congress, not invented by the Treasury Department. That mattered for the remedy: where the IRS had merely read in an unauthorized limitation, courts could strike the agency gloss and order payment. The dual-number rule, by contrast, was the law itself, which is why the plaintiffs had to reach for the Constitution rather than the Administrative Procedure Act.
When agency overreach was the problem instead
The distinction is visible by contrast with Scholl v. Mnuchin, litigated in the Northern District of California. There, incarcerated people had been denied payments not by statutory text but by an IRS position that read the word “eligible individual” to exclude them. The court held that the agency’s reading was contrary to law and exceeded its authority, certified a nationwide class, and ordered the IRS to reprocess payments; final judgment was entered in January 2021, and well over a billion dollars reached people the agency had tried to write out.
That outcome underscores the structural point for the immigration exclusion: a court can readily undo an agency’s unauthorized gloss on a statute, but it is far more cautious about rewriting a line Congress drew on purpose. For the mixed-status families, the most realistic relief was always going to come from Congress, and that is where it eventually came from.
How Congress walked it partway back
The political response arrived in two steps. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of December 2020, authorizing a second $600 payment, changed the joint-filing rule going forward and retroactively. Under the revised approach, a Social Security number holder filing jointly with an ITIN spouse could now receive a payment for themselves and for any qualifying children with Social Security numbers, and the fix reached back to make those families whole for the first round they had been denied. The American Rescue Plan Act of March 2021, authorizing the $1,400 payment, kept that one-Social-Security-number structure in place.
What did not change was the position of the undocumented ITIN filer. Across all three rounds, a taxpayer without a work-eligible Social Security number remained ineligible for a payment of their own; the later statutes rescued the citizen and lawful-resident members of mixed-status households, not the ITIN holders at the center of them. The relief, in other words, was reframed from an exclusion of families to an exclusion of individuals by status, a narrower line but the same underlying choice.
What the episode leaves behind
The pandemic-payment fights produced no controlling appellate ruling that the dual-number requirement was unconstitutional; Congress mooted much of the litigation by amending the statute before the deepest questions were answered. The episode nonetheless sharpened a recurring problem in federal benefits design: when eligibility is keyed to a number that doubles as an immigration marker, the burden falls not only on the targeted population but on the citizens bound to them by marriage and parentage. Future relief programs will inherit that lesson, and the unresolved equal-protection theories advanced in Amador remain available the next time Congress draws a benefit line through the same households. For readers tracking how courts have handled adjacent questions of federal authority and individual rights during the same period, the publication’s case tracker follows the relevant dockets.
Questions readers ask
Did the CARES Act exclude all immigrants from stimulus payments?
No. Lawful immigrants with a work-eligible Social Security number could qualify on the same terms as citizens. The exclusion fell on immigrants who file taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number rather than a Social Security number, and on anyone who filed a joint return with such a person.
What is the difference between an SSN and an ITIN here?
A Social Security number issued for work is the statute’s “valid identification number.” An ITIN is an IRS-issued number that lets people without an SSN file and pay federal taxes. Filing with an ITIN, rather than an SSN, was what triggered ineligibility under the original CARES Act rule.
Why were U.S. citizens denied payments under this rule?
Because the rule reached joint returns. If a citizen filed jointly with a spouse who used an ITIN, the couple was treated as ineligible, so the citizen lost the payment for herself and often for her citizen children, despite qualifying on her own.
How many people were affected?
Estimates placed the reach on the order of 14 million people in mixed-status families, including several million U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents excluded because of a household member’s immigration status.
What was the military exception?
The statute allowed a couple to qualify with a single Social Security number on a joint return if one spouse was a member of the armed forces during the year. Without that service, both joint filers needed a valid number.
What did Amador v. Mnuchin argue?
That conditioning a citizen’s payment on a spouse’s immigration status violated equal protection and due process under the Fifth Amendment. The district court denied the government’s motions to dismiss and let the case proceed, but the rule was changed by legislation before any final constitutional ruling.
How is Scholl v. Mnuchin different?
Scholl involved incarcerated people excluded by an IRS interpretation, not by statutory text. Because the limitation was an agency gloss, the court could strike it and order payment. The immigration exclusion, by contrast, was written into the statute, so it could not be undone the same way.
Did Congress fix the exclusion?
Partly. The December 2020 relief law and the March 2021 American Rescue Plan allowed Social Security number holders married to ITIN filers to receive payments for themselves and their qualifying SSN-holding children, with retroactive relief for the first round.
Are undocumented immigrants now eligible?
No. Across all three rounds, a taxpayer without a work-eligible Social Security number remained ineligible for a payment of their own. The later fixes covered the citizen and lawful-resident members of mixed-status households, not ITIN filers themselves.
Could a similar exclusion be challenged again?
The equal-protection theories raised in the mixed-status cases were never resolved by a higher court, so they remain available if Congress keys a future benefit to immigration status in the same way. How a court would rule would depend heavily on the standard of review and the fit between the rule and its stated purpose.
Golden Gate Legal Review offers commentary and analysis on developments in the law; it is not legal advice.
