A description of the Vaello-Madero case.

Last year, the First Circuit held that excluding Puerto Rican residents from the SSI program violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.234 As recounted at the start of this Article, José Luis Vaello- Madero was born in Puerto Rico in 1954 and is hence a U.S. citizen by birth.235 He moved to New York in 1985. In June 2012, Vaello-Madero began receiving monthly SSI disability benefits, and in 2013, he moved back to Puerto Rico. When Vaello-Madero filed for his old-age Social Security bene- fits in Puerto Rico in June 2016, the federal agency informed him that it would discontinue his SSI benefits. The agency’s “Notice of Planned Action” stated that Vaello-Madero had been “outside of the U.S. for 30 days in a row or more” since August 1, 2014, because the agency “consider[ed] the U.S. to be the 50 States of the U.S., the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mar- iana Islands.”236

Roughly a year later, the federal government sued Vaello-Madero to col- lect the allegedly improper benefit payments, for a total of $28,081. An inves- tigator employed by the agency got Vaello-Madero to sign a Stipulation of Consent Judgment, which the federal government promptly filed in court. The district court then appointed counsel for Vaello-Madero who filed an answer to the complaint raising as an affirmative defense that excluding Vaello-Madero and other Puerto Rican residents from SSI benefits violated equal protection. The federal government then moved to withdraw the stipu- lation and for voluntary dismissal without prejudice. The district judge ac- cepted the withdrawal of the stipulation but denied the voluntary dismissal. On cross-motions for summary judgment, the district judge ruled in favor of Vaello-Madero. And the First Circuit affirmed, holding that excluding Puer- to Rican residents from the SSI program violates the equal protection guar- antees of the Fifth Amendment.237

Similarly, a federal district court judge, in granting a motion for sum- mary judgment, concluded that excluding Puerto Ricans who are U.S. citi- zens from SSI, SNAP, and Medicare Part D subsidies violates equal protection under the Fifth Amendment.238 In Peña Martínez, nine Puerto Rican resi- dents sued the federal government on the grounds that excluding them from those three federal programs violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.239 The district court detailed how “[t]he federal safety net is flimsier and more porous in Puerto Rico than in the rest of the nation.”240