WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says Democrats want to undo a provision in coronavirus legislation that bars families with mixed immigration status from receiving stimulus payments from the Internal Revenue Service.

“We want to address the mixed-family issue,” the San Francisco Democrat said at her weekly news conference Thursday, without committing to it being part of the next bill the House passes on the pandemic.

At issue are payments up to $2,400 for married couples who file their taxes jointly and $500 each for dependent children. Legislation that Congress passed in March authorizing the payments excludes people who file with an individual taxpayer identification number, which is used by taxpaying undocumented immigrants who do not have Social Security numbers.

That exclusion means that families in which one spouse is a citizen but the other is not, and those in which the parents are undocumented but their children are U.S. citizens, are ineligible for the payments.

Pelosi declined to give specifics on how Democrats would seek to change the provision. She said she is scheduled to have a call Friday with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas.

“We have been working to get the tax identification number as a basis for how people would get direct payments,” Pelosi said. “I myself cannot understand why the tax number is not the basis for how some of this money is distributed, so we’ll be making that case.”

The speaker also responded to a question about supporting undocumented immigrants more broadly than the stimulus payments. She said she is pleased that the Federal Reserve is looking at ways to extend lending programs to nonprofits, including those that work with immigrants.

California has partnered with nonprofits to set up a $125 million fund to give cash payments to undocumented immigrants in the state.

Pelosi praised such efforts, saying, “We are well served if we recognize that everybody in our country is part of our community and ... helping to grow the economy. Most of what we are doing is to meet the needs of people, but it’s all stimulus, so we shouldn’t cut the stimulus off.”

The exclusion of mixed-status families from the federal payments is the subject of a lawsuit in Maryland. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund argues the provision is unconstitutional because it treats married couples of mixed status differently than citizen married couples.

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan