Our firm gained a $1.5 million settlement for an undocumented worker injured in a construction accident involving a commercial vehicle whose injuries to his back and knee caused a significant impact on his life, particularly during the two years when he was unable to work.
The lengths the defense went to avoid taking responsibility was astounding. The defense not only contested liability, but they also tried to assert that his injuries were primarily soft-tissue-related, and hadn’t affected his life that seriously (even though he could not work for two years), and returned to work on lighter duty for lesser pay. For months, they conducted surveillance of his home, followed him to places like Target and to breakfast with his family, and even to his job.
On top of that, they outrageously tried to claim that as an undocumented worker, he either should not be allowed to make a wage loss claim for future wages at all, or that he should only be awarded the equivalent of what he would have made in his native Mexico – which might be one-third of U.S. wages.
In the case of our client, this was particularly unjust as he had been brought to the U.S. at age 6, attended elementary through high school in this country, and worked and paid taxes from ages 18 to 28, when the injuries occurred. He had been eligible for the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program but had never applied; he’s even married to a citizen and has two children with her, making him eligible to become a U.S. citizen, but that process takes a lot of time and money due to the political climate in Washington.
Caselaw on what happens in this type of circumstance is not entirely clear—which is not entirely fair. But given the contractor had been happy to knowingly employ this undocumented worker as long as he was healthy—which we had the employment records and tax returns to prove—we were able to persuasively show the defenses arguments were nothing but excuses in the end, to the point where the defense did not want to risk a trial and thus settled for the $1.5 million.
This issue is bigger than just one case and our firm would like to see—in the State of Illinois and beyond—a fairer, safer and more reasonable way of handling injury claims involving immigrant workers. If someone is working and paying taxes, whether or not they are documented, they should be entitled to make a full wage-loss claim.
The Biden Administration recently rolled a program to protect undocumented workers injured or otherwise exposed to hazardous work environments so that they do not fear speaking up as a whistleblower and notifying the Department of Labor; instead, they are shielded from deportation, given a work permit, and their employer, if appropriate, is cited. The goal behind this policy is to make jobsites and work safer not only for immigrant workers, but also for US citizens working along side them.
The civil justice system should stand up for that principle as well. One of the tenants of the civil justice system is deterrence. If companies know they could be held fully liable for lost wages, that’s likely to result in safer job sites, for undocumented workers and everyone else. But if companies know that an undocumented worker originally from Mexico, for example, can have their damages reduced by two-thirds, that presents less of a deterrance—and would result in less safe workplaces. Its not okay for some jobsites to be more dangerous than others because of workers immigration status. We rely, as an economy, on these workers. We all know they’re here. They’re paying taxes in the U.S. The reason they come here in the first place is that they can make significantly more money There is no reasonable justification to artificially limit their recoveries from bad actors as a result.
Our goal is to set in motion a change in the law, working hand-in-hand with U.S. citizens and workers with green cards. Today, many lawyers don’t bring these claims because they don’t want their clients to have to discuss, at trial, the fact that they’re undocumented. And many undocumented people are frightened to have any involvement with the legal system at all. They don’t want to be “outed.”
Our client was braver than most. And ultimately, he was a young man who worked extremely hard and was doing the best he could under the circumstances after his injuries. Defendants in these types of cases should not be able to hide behind a political debate in Washington over who should or should not be allowed to work legally in this country—especially when our economy relies on more than 7 million undocumented workers to keep the economy going.
We should be thanking these hard-working people and their families. They continued to work at the height of the COVID shutdowns, when most people didn’t want to leave their homes. We should not be stiffing them or treating them unfairly when they get hurt. Rather, as a society, we should be assuring them we are going to do everything we can to keep their job sites safe…..just like we do for all citizens in our country. To do that, we must allow all people, irrespective of immigration status, to make full wage loss claims.
