Editor’s Note: Thanks to a class-action court settlement, a quarter-million elders and people with disabilities can now reapply for wrongly stopped or denied Social Security or SSI benefits. Those cut off because of old or mistaken arrest warrants can reclaim their share of $500 million in lost benefits nationally. 


SSI Settlement Briefing 2 from New America Media on Vimeo.

Rosa Martinez didn’t know what to do when the Social Security Administration told her two years ago that the agency was stopping her disability assistance because she had an outstanding 1980 arrest warrant for illegal possession of prescription drugs in Miami. A resident of Redwood City, Calif., she has never visited Miami.

Martinez, now 53, had to quit work as a health care worker when she developed fibromyalgia, a painful and energy-sapping chronic condition. With her only income source terminated, she borrowed from friends and family to make her rent and buy food. She pleaded with a series of bureaucrats that she could not be the same Rosa Martinez named in the old warrant, a Rosa eight inches taller. But those please fell on deaf ears.

“Maybe God put me in this situation so I could help others,” she said at a New America Media press briefing, where she and legal aid attorneys described how she became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit, Martinez v. Astrue, against the Social Security Administration. Michael Astrue is the Social Security commissioner.

The class action lawsuit led to federal court settlement that will return up to $500 million to about a quarter million people, who had their Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) supports wrongfully cut off by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

".......Sometimes warrants were for completely different people, such as Martinez, said McIntyre. In one case, an older black woman with the first name of Willie lost her assistance when Social Security confused her with a man named Willie who had been charged with rape."

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