For nearly a decade at the time of writing, personal injury claimants within California have not had to be concerned about immigration status. This article intends to showcase how things used to be handled for decades and how they have been handled since February 2017.
Rodriguez v. Kline: Standard Operating Procedure Since the 1980s
Before 2017, the case of Rodriguez v. Kline established California’s statute for concerns of immigration status in personal injury cases. In this case, plaintiff Jesus Rodriguez had been seriously harmed in a motor vehicle accident on October 23, 1979. After his trial, the jury ruled in Rodriguez’s favor and he was awarded $99,000 ($416,193.91 in today’s money). Still, a portion of his damages were based on calculations for earnings Rodriguez would have lost due to injury. Rodriguez had entered the country through illegal means and had been living and working in the country since 1959. Defendant Samuel Kline appealed the court’s judgment, arguing that Rodriguez’s status as an illegal alien meant that Rodriguez’s total damages should have been calculated according to what Rodriguez would have earned working in Mexico, his home country.
The Court’s Appealed Ruling
Even when the case was appealed, the panel of three judges sided with Rodriguez. They then stipulated that courts had to hold a pretrial hearing regarding a plaintiff’s immigration status if it was challenged by a defendant. During this hearing, the defendant would have to prove that the plaintiff could be deported. The plaintiff would then need to provide evidence that remedied any conditions that might lead to deportation.
The Problem with This Ruling
While the ruling and the role of immigration status in assessing lost earnings makes logical sense, this law still gets complicated by the Gordian knot of U.S. immigration law. Immigration has plenty of rules and regulations, often that run at odds with each other, that make clarifying someone’s deportability nearly impossible. There are also problems with people in the country on conditional residency, leading to some lawfully permanent residents being deported for a variety of issues. This can even affect people who became citizens via marriage should the marriage be confirmed to be a sham.
Because of the litany of circumstances that can lead to deportation despite having a green card, some injured parties recovered far less than they would have otherwise received simply due to the precedent set by Rodriguez v. Kline.
AB 2159: How Things Work Now
After being agreed to in 2016 and put into effect in February of 2017, AB 2159 stated that a court is disallowed from asking about a plaintiff’s immigration status within the context of a personal injury case. To clarify, immigration status is not a type of evidence that may be submitted for a personal injury trial. This means that any calculations for lost income that go into awarding damages for the plaintiff must be made under the assumption that a person who suffered a personal injury in California is American rather than any other ethnicity.
To be blunt, the immigration status of a plaintiff does not impact their right to file a personal injury claims. Should the plaintiff win the case, damages for their lost wages will be only assessed according to how much money the person would have lost while working in the United States. Just as a reminder, if the Rodriguez judgment were still in effect, this would have meant that Rodriguez would have only received around $20,809.70 in damages in today’s money; the Mexican Peso is worth roughly one-twentieth the value of a United States Dollar.
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