San Francisco to publicly fund legal services for unaccompanied immigrant minors
The city and county of San Francisco voted yesterday to allocate $2.1 million for legal services to unaccompanied immigrant minors and families facing deportation, according to KPIX.
The money will fund legal services to minors and families facing expedited removal in San Francisco Immigration Court. The federal government expedited minors’ removal cases this summer after the flood of minors arriving at the border became a political issue and a strain on federal resources. About 66,000 minors have been apprehended since last October, Customs and Border Protection says. Almost all of them are from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico: The governments of those countries have been unable to address severe existing gang violence.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday afternoon to allocate $1.06 million of general fund money to legal services for the minors this year and the same amount next year. The money will go to the Mayor’s Office of Housing. It wasn’t clear how much will be spent on direct representation, as opposed to group “know your rights” presentations.
However, the San Francisco funding is unlikely to meet all of the need. A report by the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee estimated that unrepresented removal clients in San Francisco need $6.25 million a year in legal representation.
ABA president William Hubbard supported the move in a letter submitted to the board, saying the influx of minors is “reflects a regional humanitarian crisis.” Because court-appointed attorneys are not provided in removal cases, he noted, these minors must represent themselves against experienced trial attorneys.
As in other areas of the law, representing yourself in removal proceedings often leads to bad outcomes. According to a study from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Clearinghouse, half of all represented respondents were permitted to stay in the country when they had attorneys; that dropped to 10 percent for those without representation.
Public defender programs for removal defendants are rare. The New York City Council funded a pilot project in 2013 providing attorneys for detained immigrants, the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, NPR reported at the time. The program was expanded this year, the Associated Press reported. California governor Jerry Brown announced a bill in August that would grant $3 million to nonprofits providing legal services to unaccompanied minors. And the New York Times reported in June on the announcement of an AmeriCorps legal aid program that would use federal money on direct representation for immigrants in removal.
