Labor activists celebrated a court decision halting a rule to use Social Security records for immigration enforcement with a warning that the proposal may resurface later.
About two dozen people demonstrated against the rule — put on hold this week by a federal judge in California — in front of the Social Security Administration’s Stout Street office today.
Labor and business interests both opposed the rule, which would require employers to fire workers if their Social Security numbers couldn’t be verified within 90 days.
The judge, Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California, found that the database the agency uses to determine whether a Social Security number matches the name of a worker is riddled with errors.
Those errors could lead to thousands of people in the United States legally losing their jobs, he said Wednesday in halting enforcement of the rule.
Breyer ordered an injunction stopping the rule until the court can make a final decision in the case.
“We are hoping that the injunction becomes permanent,” Taylor Pendergrass, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which sued to block the rule from going into effect, told about two dozen demonstrators.
A spokeswoman for the Social Security Administration’s Denver region office said because the case is still being litigated, she could not comment on it.
The ACLU was joined by the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, two organizations frequently at odds, in its lawsuit.
Similar demonstrations were set at Social Security Administration offices throughout the country.
The agency shouldn’t be put in a position where it must enforce immigration, said Gabriela Flora, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee. “If they are enforcing immigration, they can’t do what we need them to do,” she said.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
