A national Latino legal and civil rights organization has been going after financial institutions for allegedly implementing policies that discriminate against eligible DACA recipients by denying them loans and other services based on their immigration status, according to 10 lawsuits filed over the past seven years.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, better known as MALDEF, filed its two most recent lawsuits last week.
“It’s a big problem,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel at MALDEF, said in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. In addition to the lawsuits they have already filed, MALDEF is investigating “at least half a dozen more” similar cases. “Every time we file one of these cases, we get contacted by people saying, ‘Hey, this happened to me at another bank or credit union.'”
Nearly 580,000 undocumented young adults, many of them Latino, who came to the U.S. as children can work and study without fear of deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. With the employment authorization card and social security number they receive under the Obama-era program, DACA recipients can apply for certain types of loans to buy a house or a car as well as access other kinds of financial services. Their DACA status must be renewed every two years.
On Wednesday, MALDEF sued Noble Credit Union on behalf of a 28-year-old DACA recipient from California who was denied a car loan based on the credit union’s “limited and arbitrary immigration-status requirements,” according to the lawsuit first obtained by NBC News on Thursday.
Noemi Peraza Lopez applied for a $35,000 auto loan this past summer and got approval from Noble, according to the complaint, which was still being processed, pending acceptance by the court Thursday.
Noble then denied the loan after seeing that Peraza Lopez’s driver’s license states it’s for “limited-term,” meaning its renewal aligns with the DACA recipient’s renewal status every…
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