Some political refugees, including Iraqi Kurds or Vietnamese Hmong, stand to lose lifeline payments. (U.S. Army)

In recent weeks, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has received dozens of messages from refugees facing extraordinary hardship. One came from a 50-year-old woman confined to a wheelchair. She fled government persecution in Liberia, and is worried about passing her naturalization test. Another woman came to the U.S. from Cuba. She depleted her finances battling cancer.

[Economy1] But the two women are not worried about their health, or their status. They are worried about their Supplemental Security Income, a program that allows the elderly and disabled, including humanitarian refugees, to small Social Security payments. (Normally non-citizens cannot receive Social Security in any form. The United States makes an exception for refugees.) Just a few thousand non-citizens need them, and they are available for only the neediest people: those who have less than $2,000 to their name and are elderly, blind, or suffering from disabilities. Refugee recipients tend to be particularly strapped. The first woman lost her Supplemental Security Income payments is April. The second will lose them this week — on Oct. 1 — along with 3,800 others.

Yesterday, the Senate considered a measure to extend eligibility for Supplemental Security Income for some of the neediest refugees. The bill, introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), would cost about $22 million, fully paid for by a fee collected for unemployment fraud. It came up for unanimous consent, but failed to pass in the final hours of the session.

Refugee advocates are outraged. Non-citizen SSI recipients have often undergone persecution and torture. They fled atrocities in Sudan, Iraq, Russia and Vietnam before receiving refuge and minimal support here. Advocates of extending SSI eligibility argue the federal government has broken its promise to refugees by setting limits on how long elderly and disabled refugees can receive federal aid without gaining citizenship. Unlike others who receive SSI payments, refugees are limited to a short time period — seven years — for receiving funding until they become U.S. citizens.

Eligibility was extended in 2008, when President George W. Bush pushed for two additional years of SSI payments for elderly and disabled refugees. But now the two years are up, and some of these refugees have remained unable to gain citizenship. When the new fiscal year starts Friday, they could be dropped off SSI payments until they are able to become citizens — if they are able to successfully complete the process at all.

The problem is that refugees are welcomed into the U.S., but treated differently from citizens under the SSI program, says Dinah Wiley, public benefits policy attorney for the National Immigration Law Center.

“It’s a matter of equity and fairness,” she says. “Cutting people off is not an issue for citizens, and we’re imposing an additional citizenship requirements on these SSI recipients that many of them just can’t meet.”

The standards were established in 1996, when welfare reform created time limits for refugees receiving SSI payments. After coming to the U.S., legal residents must wait at least five years to apply for citizenship, a process that requires them to know some English and pay application fees unless they obtain waivers. The system is designed with loopholes in place to help the poor, elderly and disabled, who often have more difficulty learning English and coming up with the $595 naturalization fees. But the same issue that keeps refugees from passing the tests often keeps them from getting out of it: Many do not know the waivers are an option or where they can go for help.

While Melanie Nezer, senior director U.S. policy and advocacy, hears from many refugees who have lost or face losing SSI payments, she says she worries more about the refugees who do not know they can reach out for support.

“These are people who don’t always have access to help,” Nezer says. “If they could reach us, we could help them, but these are people who don’t even know where to start.”

It would be better to end time limits for eligibility, advocates say, but in the meantime a one-year extension could prevent thousands of refugees from losing SSI payments. Groups say they plan to continue to lobby in the lame duck session and next year for Congress to eliminate limits on SSI eligibility for refugees.

Although efforts to extend SSI payments have not encountered serious opposition — the extension in 2008 earned bipartisan support — rights groups have had trouble getting it added to the legislative calendar. “We don’t really hear opposition, we just have difficulty getting support,” Wiley says.

“It costs a certain amounts to provide benefits to people, but what does it cost for people to be dropping off and being reinstated, causing a lot of anguish on the part of very vulnerable fragile people and their friends and neighbors?” she says. “All the costs have to be considered.”

One cost is on local communities and governments, which often have to step in when the federal government does not. This is frustrating for state legislatures, which have no ability to control the influx of refugees into their state but are tasked with spending state funds to pay for their health care and support when federal payments stop.

The National Conference of State Legislatures pushed for the government to extend eligibility to ensure refugees are given payments by the federal government. In a Sept. 28 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the organization said Congress should extend payments to prevent “states from bearing the unfair burden of providing for the health and welfare of these individuals,” made even more difficult as state budgets shrink in the recession.

“If the government withdraws SSI benefits, [refugees] are shifted to state and local governments if their health care takes place in the emergency room or their income support comes from state programs,” says Sheri Steisel of the National Conference for State Legislatures. “We believe the federal government has a responsibility to live up to the decision they make in deciding who is a refugee.”

When all levels of government fail the refugees, local communities are often left with the cost. This is true for refugees of all ages, but particularly the elderly and disabled who receive SSI payments, says Eric Sigmon, director for advocacy for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Because the effort to extend eligibility failed, the refugees who lose their federal aid Friday will be particularly dependent on these social networks, he says.

“It may mean they will have to rely on friends and family, maybe even their churches and other organizations to find a way to pay for food and grocery or ongoing health care,” he says. “Efforts will have to be taken to make sure outreach is done to create some kind of safety net for folks that will be facing some pretty tough times.”

Analyzing previously unreleased documents obtained through litigation assessing the government’s compliance with 15 detention standards, the report finds “widespread and severe violations” of the standards. The standards pertain to issues such as visitation rights, legal representation, telephone access and disciplinary actions by ICE. The report also notes that reviews by the American Bar Association and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees “routinely documented violations that government reviews failed to capture, even when reviews of the same facilities conducted by the government and an independent agency occurred within a few weeks or months of each other.”

Violations overlooked by DHS included, for example, that detainees were punished more severely than allowed for minor disciplinary infractions.

Part of the problem, claim some of the lawyers involved in producing the new report, is that the DHS rules are not judicially enforceable, so there’s no way to ensure the agency follows them. Last week DHS rejected a petition by immigrants’ rights advocates to promulgate rules that would be enforceable, concluding that “rulemaking would be laborious, time consuming, and less flexible, and could impede DHS’s ability to expeditiously respond to changed circumstances.”

Known as 287(g) authority because of the section of the immigration law that authorizes it, this delegation of federal law enforcement power to local police has sparked strong criticism from immigrants’ rights advocates for failing to prioritize the most serious crimes and allowing local sheriffs, like the notorious Joe Arpaio of Arizona, to target immigrants for the most minor crimes and allegedly engage in racial profiling.

The new standardized memorandum of understanding between DHS and local police, according to DHS, “defines the objectives of the 287(g) program, outlines the immigration enforcement authorities granted by the agreement and provides guidelines for ICE’s supervision of local agency officer operations, information reporting and tracking, complaint procedures and implementation measures.”

But the new agreement isn’t satisfying immigrants’ rights advocates.

“Not in there is how they’ll enforce those objectives and priorities,” said Joan Friedland, Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center. It’s also not clear how they’ll prevent racial profiling, she noted, or whether they’ll start keeping relevant statistics to try to track it. Plus, the new agreement, in an effort to prevent local authorities from using criminal laws as a pretext for picking up immigrants for deportation, now requires law enforcement to pursue criminal charges to their resolution. Advocates say it’s not clear what that means.

“Will police interpret that as, we have to convict people? What happens to deferred prosecution?” asked Friedland. In the past, police could defer prosecution for a minor crime in exchange for a monitored period of good behavior.

The American Civil Liberties Union today released a statement expressing its disappointment with the new agreement.

“The new standardized MOA makes no serious attempt at discouraging illegal racial profiling or reducing the conflict between sound community policing principles and the expansion of this program,” said Omar Jadwat, staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The Department of Homeland Security has claimed that the new MOA contains many significant improvements, but now that we actually have the document, it is clear that many of the claimed changes are really not changes at all, that the remaining changes have little or no positive operative effect, and that the new MOA actually takes several disturbing steps backward, particularly in the area of transparency.”

The new standardized agreement can be found here. The ACLU’s comparison of the new agreement with the old agreement with Maricopa County in Arizona is here.

Update: This afternoon a group of 25 civil rights and community groups issued a statement denouncing DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s plans to expand the 287(g) program to 11 more jurisdictions around the country.

Here’s the statement of Andrea Black, Coordinator of the Detention Watch Network:

DHS is fully aware that the abusive misuse of the 287(g) program by its current slate of agencies has rendered it not only ineffective, but dangerous to community safety.  It is surprising Napolitano did not simply shut this program down. Expanding this failed program is not in line with the reform the administration has promised.