Language, immigration status, and injury claims in California Your status stays out of your case.

California does not condition an injury recovery on immigration status, and three statutes say the rights and remedies of state law are available regardless of it. In a civil action for personal injury or wrongful death, Evidence Code section 351.2 provides that evidence of a person's immigration status shall not be admitted into evidence, nor shall discovery into a person's immigration status be permitted. If English is not your first language, the Judicial Council's self-help guide says court interpreters are provided free of charge, with one form to ask.

Your status stays out of the case

Two terms decide this subject. Discovery is the formal exchange of information before trial: written questions, demands for documents, and depositions, which are recorded question and answer sessions under oath. Admissible means a jury is allowed to hear it. Section 351.2 closes both doors in one sentence, so the defense cannot ask the question in discovery and cannot show the answer to a jury. Immigration law itself, and eligibility for public benefits or health coverage, run on separate rules and are not covered here.

Subdivision (b) of the same section is the part most people do not read. It states that the section does not affect the standards of relevance, admissibility, or discovery prescribed by Civil Code section 3339, Government Code section 7285, Health and Safety Code section 24000, and Labor Code section 1171.5. In other words, the evidence bar in a personal injury case sits on top of a set of substantive rights that already existed, and each of those has its own reach.

How far the four protections go

They are often quoted as if they were one rule, and they are not. The evidence bar is written for personal injury and wrongful death actions. The other three are written for the enforcement of state law generally, and two of them reach further than the third.

All three of the rights statutes use the same operating sentence: all protections, rights, and remedies available under state law, except any reinstatement remedy prohibited by federal law, are available to all individuals regardless of immigration status who have applied for employment, or who are or who have been employed, in this state. The single carve-out is a reinstatement remedy that federal law forbids, which belongs to employment cases and has nothing to do with a car crash or a fall.

All three then close the door on the question itself. Status is irrelevant to the issue of liability, and in proceedings or discovery to enforce those laws no inquiry is permitted into a person's immigration status unless the party seeking to make the inquiry has shown by clear and convincing evidence that the inquiry is necessary in order to comply with federal immigration law. Clear and convincing evidence is a higher standard than the ordinary civil one, and the burden sits on the side that wants to ask.

Section 3339 carries one more line that the other two do not. Subdivision (e) provides that any waiver of a provision of that section is contrary to public policy and is void and unenforceable. A release, an employment document, or a settlement paper cannot buy the protection away from you.

How to get a court interpreter

The Judicial Council's self-help guide on asking for an interpreter states that court interpreters are provided free of charge. In a civil case the request is form INT-300, Request for Interpreter (Civil). The form is published in many languages so you can read it, and it is completed in English. File as soon as you know you have a court date, because each court sets its own lead time and the guide tells you to ask as soon as you find out you have to go to court.

Testimony has its own statute. Evidence Code section 752 provides that when a witness cannot understand English, or cannot express themselves in English so as to be understood directly by counsel, court, and jury, an interpreter whom the witness can understand shall be sworn to interpret. In a civil action the statute apportions the interpreter's compensation among the parties as the court determines, and it may later be taxed as costs, meaning charged as a court cost at the end of the case.

A deposition is not a court hearing, so nobody is assigned to you there. We book a professional interpreter for depositions and for medical appointments where one is needed, and we carry it as a case cost. We do not let a child or a family member interpret a medical history, because much of what a doctor writes in a chart comes from what the patient said, and a claim is later argued out of that chart. We answer these questions in Spanish too, on our página en español.

How we handle immigration status

We do not ask a client for immigration papers. Status is not part of what has to be proved in a negligence claim, it is not admissible, and it is not our business. We do not report anyone to any agency. We do not practice immigration law, and Josh Kohanim is licensed in California only, so anything with an immigration consequence goes to a lawyer who does that work. Both answers, that we do not ask and that we do not report, should come in the first conversation, before you have signed anything.

If a defense lawyer asks the question at a deposition anyway, the answer is not an argument on the record. Code of Civil Procedure section 2025.420 lets any party or deponent, the person being questioned, move promptly for a protective order, an order shielding them from the question, before, during, or after a deposition, and the court may make any order that justice requires to protect a person from unwarranted annoyance, embarrassment, or oppression. Section 351.2 supplies the reason, and the motion supplies the record.

When these protections do not cover you

Four situations sit outside what these statutes decide, and it is better to know which is which before you rely on any of them.

• The case is not a personal injury or wrongful death action. Section 351.2 is written for those two. A different kind of civil case runs on Civil Code section 3339, Government Code section 7285, and Labor Code section 1171.5, and their reach is the list in the table above.
• The claim is against your employer. Labor Code section 1171.5 speaks to state labor and employment laws, while sections 3339 and 7285 also name civil rights, consumer protection, and housing laws. If you were hurt at work, the workers' compensation claim and the claim against a third party run in parallel, and our page on Los Angeles construction accidents explains how those two fit together.
• The question is about coverage, not about the claim. Eligibility for Medi-Cal and other programs is decided by its own rules, and one of them changed on January 1, 2026. Our post on getting treated after a crash with no health insurance lays out the current order of operations.
• Somebody asks for a Social Security number. Adjusters ask for identifying information for their own file handling. Do not answer that on a phone call. Ask for the request in writing, and route it through your attorney with everything else.

One thing status does not change at all is the calendar. The deadline to sue for a personal injury is the same two years for everyone, and a claim involving a city, a county, or a transit agency has to be presented within six months. Our table of every California injury deadline has the citations, and a missed deadline is the one problem in this practice that usually cannot be fixed.

Whether immigration status affects your claim

It does not affect your right to recover, and inside a personal injury or wrongful death case it is not a subject the other side is allowed to open. The statutes are short, they are public, and they are linked above so you can read them yourself. What decides your case is the same thing that decides every case: whether somebody was careless, and what that carelessness did to you.

The next step is the ordinary one. Get treated, keep the records, write down what happened while it is close, and get the deadline on a calendar. Our frequently asked questions page covers the rest of the process in the same plain terms, in English, and our Spanish page covers it in Spanish. There is no fee unless we recover.