The plan to deliver a one-time payment of up to $ 1,000 per undocumented family That Governor Gavin Newsom announced more than a month ago began chaotically on Monday. And it is that the volume of calls exceeded the capacity of community organizations in charge of assisting the California Department of Social Services in reaching the funds to 150,000 immigrants without papers in the state.
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“So much‘ show ’to deliver money that is not coming out of his own pocket, if not from the taxes we all pay … If they did things in order it would be better,” criticized Roger Ramírez through Facebook.
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Others, like Daniel Saldaña Ojeda, used the same means to share screenshots of their cell phones and show that since 9:00 am on Monday they have made hundreds of calls without any success.
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Messages like those of these immigrants are repeated by hundreds on social networks and offer a glimpse of the need and despair that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants have suffered since the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed the California economy and left millions of residents of the state in Unemployment.
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System exceeded
The California Institute of Public Policy estimates that an estimated 2.6 million undocumented immigrants live in the state, so just 6 percent of undocumented immigrants in the state will be able to access economic relief from coronavirus.
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And while state authorities anticipated that the $ 75 million fund to be distributed among 150,000 undocumented immigrants could be completed in a matter of days, it seems that they did not anticipate the volume of requests they would receive from one of the communities hardest hit by the coronavirus crisis.
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“We are experiencing a technical difficulty with our DRAI phone line this morning and we are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We will post a message on Facebook and on our website as soon as the lines work. We thank you for your patience and understanding, “he said in a release the Catholic Charities Immigration Support and Legal Services Center in the Bay Area.
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Until the publication of this article, their hotline was still not working, and the same was true of the rest of the organizations in charge of receiving the requests in the other counties of California.
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To fuel the chaos in which the program kicked off, as thousands of undocumented immigrants tried to contact the 12 community organizations for help, the California Department of Social Services website was down. After several attempts to log in for an announcement about the failure to deliver aid, a message finally appeared saying that the site was “under maintenance.”
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They ask for patience
Some undocumented people who managed to communicate with community organizations that will distribute the money received the same message related to the technical problems presented by the hotline.
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When the failure is solved, keep in mind that these are the phone numbers to call to apply for financial aid depending on the region of California in which you live:
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The documents you need
The DSS guide establishes that the network of non-profit organizations will give priority to low-income adults, who must provide information that proves their immigration status as undocumented and who are not eligible to the economic stimulus for coronavirus from the federal government or unemployment benefits.
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Below, we solve all the doubts you may have about the single payment for the undocumented in the state:
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Follow our coverage of the pandemic and find the resources that authorities and non-profit organizations offer to survive the coronavirus crisis:
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