In 2013, Jose Luis Vaello-Madero moved back to Puerto Rico. He had lived and worked in New York since 1985. His wife had already moved back to the island for medical reasons; now he would join her there to help take care of her. By then, he had developed health problems as well. And so, like millions of other Americans, he sought and received benefits under the Supplemental Security Income program that his taxes had helped fund over the years.
If Vaello-Madero had moved to a remote cabin in Alaska or bought a houseboat in Florida, he would have been able to continue collecting SSI without a problem. But Congress had only authorized the SSI program in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
When the Social Security Administration learned three years later that Vaello-Madero was still receiving payments inside Puerto Rico, they stopped disbursing them. Then the agency sued him to recover the $28,081 he had already received.
Now the Supreme Court will decide if he—and the commonwealth in which he now lives—were unjustly denied access to the program by Congress. The justices agreed on Monday to hear the case at the urging of the Justice Department.
If it rules in favor of Vaello-Madero, it could open up multiple nationwide benefits programs to the island’s three million residents, who are U.S. citizens. If the court sides with the Justice Department, however the court could also take the opportunity to further entrench the colonial-era rulings that keep Puerto Ricans in what the commonwealth described to the court as a “second-class citizenship not supported in the Constitution.”
The case, United States v. Vaello-Madero, first made its way to a federal district court in Puerto Rico, where the judge sided with Vaello-Madero. Congress, Judge Gustavo Gelpí wrote in his 2019 ruling, “cannot demean and brand said United States citizen while in Puerto Rico with a stigma of inferior citizenship to that of his brethren nationwide.”
The Justice Department appealed the decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel quibbled with Gelpí’s reasoning, but ultimately ruled that Congress had violated the equal-protection guarantees of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by excluding U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico.
“While we respect the legislature’s authority to make even unwise decisions to purportedly protect the fiscal integrity of SSI and the federal government itself, the Fifth Amendment does not permit the arbitrary treatment of individuals who would otherwise qualify for SSI but for their residency in Puerto Rico,” Judge Juan Torruella wrote for the panel in 2020. “Even under rational basis review, the cost of including Puerto Rico’s elderly, disabled, and blind in SSI cannot by itself justify their exclusion.”
In its briefs for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department cited two precedents to support its position. First, in the 1978 case Califano v. Torres, the Supreme Court rejected a SSI claim by a Puerto Rico resident who had argued the denial violated his right to travel.
Then, in the 1980 case Harris v. Rosario, the court overturned a lower-court ruling that held Puerto Rico’s exclusion from the predecessor program to TANF did not violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Taken together, the two rulings strongly suggest that Congress could exclude U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico from the SSI program without violating the Constitution.
Vaello-Madero pointed out that those two decisions came without full arguments or briefings, and therefore hold less precedential weight. But he also attacked the deeper line of cases that led to them. “The legal foundation upon which Califano and Harris are built is not good law,” his lawyers told the court.
“Those cases attributed Congress’s power to discriminate against Puerto Rico to the island’s territorial status under the Insular Cases—a much-criticized line of cases that are long overdue to be overruled.” The Insular Cases, in a nutshell, are a series of rulings where the Supreme Court held the Constitution does not fully apply to territories acquired by the United States during the Spanish-American War.
In those rulings, the Supreme Court distinguished Puerto Rico from other then-territories like Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma by saying the latter were on the path to eventual statehood, while territories like Puerto Rico and Guam were not. Racism played an unambiguous factor in the distinction.
In Dawnes v. Bidwell, the first of the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court described Puerto Rico and other newfound colonial possessions as “inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought” where “the administration of government and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles, may for a time be impossible.”
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