Legal Aid Newsletter 9/30/2020 – Fighting for Justice with “Passion, Dedication, and Professionalism”

Dear Friends of Legal Aid, 

Since March, Legal Aid has been doing all it can to try to make justice real, in individual and systemic ways, for those people and communities most affected by the pandemic.

As you know, DC’s Mayor has committed to working to have the District emerge a more just and more racially equitable society. Unfortunately, so far the opposite is the case: for a whole slew of reasons, including pervasive systemic racism, people and communities of color in the District have borne the brunt of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

At a citywide level, we have been advocating for the DC Council to expand and extend the protections they have already put in place, including moratoriums on evictions, foreclosures, and debt collection lawsuits. We received good news last week, as the DC Council passed a bill that would extend the Mayor’s authority to extend the public health emergency through the end of the year, including the protections for tenants, homeowners, and debtors.

Building on these policy advocacy successes, and backed by the overwhelming response from so many of you during the Making Justice Real Campaign, I am excited to report that we will soon be posting for a new Policy Advocacy Staff Attorney position at Legal Aid, with more expansions to come. This Policy Advocate position will, among other things, expand our capacity to formulate and advance a racial justice agenda at the DC agencies that serve our clients and the DC Council.

We are also responding to a surge of need for legal assistance among our client community. We received nearly 50% more requests for help from June to August 2020 versus the same time period in 2019. More than 95% of Legal Aid’s clients are people of color – again, a product of decades of discriminatory public policies and practices.

One recent client was Ayana Tesfaye (name changed for confidentiality). A single mom of two children, Ms. Tesfaye lost her job as a dental assistant soon after the pandemic began. She applied for unemployment but was denied because of a simple error on her application. After trying to fix the error on her own, Ms. Tesfaye came to Legal Aid for assistance. With Legal Aid’s help, and after fighting for six months, Ms. Tesfaye received more than $18,500 in overdue unemployment benefits.

When the money finally arrived in her account, she wrote to her attorney: “I am so grateful for your passion, dedication, and professionalism. I’ve hired lawyers before, but you are truly the best I’ve ever worked with. Thank you so much! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the amazing work.”

With more than 140,000 jobless claims filed in DC since March, we know Ms. Tesfaye is not alone, and the problem is bigger and broader than just unemployment. Domestic violence is on the rise, and we are still anticipating a surge of housing and debt problems for DC residents once the moratoriums end.

Thanks to thousands of dedicated supporters, more help is on the way. In addition to the new Policy Advocacy position, we will soon be adding legal positions in a wide variety of issue areas (please help us spread the word about all our open positions).

Thank you for your support and partnership, and please read on to learn more about how we are responding to the ongoing emergency and working towards a more just and equitable DC.

All the best,

Eric

Eric Angel | Executive Director

Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia

1331 H Street, NW | Suite 350 

Washington, DC 20005 | www.LegalAidDC.org

Nats Raise Funds for Legal Aid

Thank you to the World Series Champion Washington Nationals (we don’t have much longer to say that!) and Nationals Philanthropies for benefitting Legal Aid during their 50/50 Fundraiser during the Nats’ series against Atlanta. Fifty percent of all proceeds raised will support Legal Aid’s mission to make justice real, in individual and systemic ways, for people in poverty in DC.

Workers Testify About “Demeaning and Degrading” Unemployment Application Process

Pictured: Thomas Kennerly testifies before the DC Council on September 16.

One of the ways that systemic racism impacts our lives is the way government programs that primarily benefit white people (like the mortgage tax deduction) are very easy to use; but government programs that primarily benefit people of color are often designed to prevent people from easily accessing them.

On September 16, Legal Aid Supervising Attorney Drake Hagner testified before the DC Council about the difficulties workers face when applying for unemployment benefits with the DC Department of Employment Services. Drake’s testimony, made jointly with The Claimant Advocacy Program, First Shift Justice Project, Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and Whitman-Walker Legal Services, highlighted how many of DC’s failures to process jobless claims during the pandemic date back to problems that have been raised by advocates again and again since the last crisis in 2008.

Even more powerful than Legal Aid’s testimony was the testimony of six clients who came forward as public witnesses to tell the DC Council about their experiences applying for unemployment benefits:

• Thomas Kennerly (who also spoke about his story on MSNBC last month and was profiled in the Washington Post) testified about calling the Dept. of Employment Services 20 times without a response, and later being required to return a requested document within 20 minutes or else have his claim closed. “No person should ever have to suffer the way I did,” he said.

• Nataki Edison testified that “Each day, I was on hold from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. Literally eight hours straight. No one ever picked up.” She hasn’t received unemployment benefits since May, but was approved right after the hearing.

• Freddy Wiggins submitted written testimony that he lost his unemployment benefits when he accidentally answered a question incorrectly on his weekly claims card. “Over the eight weeks that I went without any income, I was at my wits’ end,” he wrote. “I had no idea what was happening or how I would pay rent or any of my living expenses.”

For more coverage, see Ally Schweitzer’s story in DCist and Michelle Murillo’s story in WTOP.

Prioritizing Access to Justice, Safely

Legal Aid is doing all we can to advocate with the DC Council and Courts to prevent a deluge of evictions, foreclosures, and debt collection lawsuits, which would predominantly impact people of color in the District. While that remains our top priority, we are also working with the Courts and our partners in the legal services community to ensure that DC residents have access to justice.

Legal Aid has been in regular contact with the Court and DC agencies regarding access and due process issues arising out of the shift to remote operations and to provide substantive expertise on local and federal legislative protections related to the pandemic.

The Courts have opened five remote hearing sites where litigants – whether they have legal representation or not – can go to participate in remote hearings if they are unable to connect from home. Social distancing will be observed at the remote sites, and the Court will provide face masks for litigants who do not have them. That is particularly important because 87% of DC residents who have died of COVID-19 were people of color. We have drafted tip sheets for both judges and litigants on best practices in remote hearings, and we are preparing a training for court navigators and staff.

We are also participating in the Court’s Landlord and Tenant, Small Claims and Foreclosure Court working groups to provide feedback regarding the operations of these high-volume courts; and leading a collaboration of all six eviction legal services providers and the Office of Attorney General to respond to landlords’ challenges to the eviction moratorium on behalf of represented and unrepresented tenants. We are also participating in an OAH working group to provide feedback on their operations during the pandemic and have recently started a collaboration with three of our partners (who also participate in this working group) to assist unrepresented OAH litigants. This work dovetails with the project of our new Skadden Fellow, Alexis Christensen.

Legal Aid is already establishing a cordial working relationship with new Chief Judge Designate Anita Josey-Herring. We look forward to working with incoming Chief Judge Josey-Herring to improve the functioning of the high-volume courts for our client community.

Legal Aid Remembers, Honors Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We mourn the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She spent her whole career fighting for the right for all of us to live with dignity and up to our full potential. When asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said, “Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.”

As the pandemic and a renewed focus on the violence against Blacks and other people of color has shown us, the tears in our society are deep, open wounds, and we cannot count on any one person (no matter how notorious) to fix them. But Justice Ginsburg’s talent, determination and brilliance helped give us the tools we need to move forward in our fight for justice. Thank you, Justice Ginsburg. Rest in peace.