Blanco

In Darces v. Woods (1984) 35 Cal.3d 871 [ 201 Cal.Rptr. 807 , 679 P.2d 458 ], our Supreme Court considered certain state regulations which reduced a grant of aid to families with dependent children (hereafter AFDC) to an employed caretaker residing with both citizen children and undocumented alien children. The court held these regulations violated the state equal protection clause (Cal. Const., art. I, § 7) to the extent that grant reduction did not take into account the needs of the undocumented children. In other words, even though state and federal law provides public assistance only to citizen (and resident alien) children, these children were being deprived of equal protection by the state’s failure to recognize that welfare benefits would be utilized by the caretaker to assist all her children, citizen or not.

Here, we consider a question related to the issue in Darces, i.e., whether equal protection requires that the needs of undocumented alien children be taken into account when determining the amount of the initial public assistance grant to family units where citizen children reside with their undocumented siblings.

While the question is intriguing, the…