Advocates Raise Alarms Over California Budget’s Restrictions on Immigration Legal Aid

With lawmakers poised to vote on the state budget bill on Friday, California legal aid groups that serve immigrants are raising alarms over some fine print that they say could seriously restrict access to deportation defense.

Legislators included language in the bill saying that the state funding that has long gone to immigration legal aid cannot be used to assist people who have any sort of felony conviction. Advocates and legal aid administrators say that’s a problem at a moment when the Trump administration is ramping up immigration raids — most recently in Los Angeles and the Central Valley — and as state leaders have vowed to vigorously protect California’s immigrants.

“The timing couldn’t be worse,” said Doan Nguyen, director for the Office of Access & Inclusion at the State Bar of California, which administers the state’s funding for legal services. “With the current atmosphere and the ICE raids … we just think that this is really going to add to the chilling effect.”

Since 1999, the state has supported legal assistance for low-income Californians dealing with issues such as housing discrimination, wage theft at work and navigating the immigration system. Last year, the Equal Access Fund distributed more than $31 million to nonprofit legal service providers, according to the State Bar.

This year’s budget bill currently says the funds “shall not be used for legal services defending an immigrant against removal from the United States or another immigration remedy based on a documented felony conviction.”

That comes after a winter special session at which the Legislature approved an extra $25 million to fund immigration legal services,  including $10 million channeled through the State Bar. Under pressure from Republicans, the Democratic authors of that bill included a caveat, reflected in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing statement, that those funds were not to be used for “individuals with serious or violent felony convictions.”

Given that history, Nguyen said she and her colleagues were expecting some kind of restrictive language in the budget bill for the next year, but they were taken aback at how broad it was, excluding even people who’ve committed nonviolent crimes such as theft or vandalism from getting help with immigration matters.

“It raises a lot of concern,” she said. “It’s going to stoke fears and create a chilling effect on low-income communities that are in need of vital legal services, even beyond immigration, say public benefits or housing-related.”

Nguyen added that she also worried that any new requirement to screen clients’ criminal histories would create an administrative burden on already stretched legal clinics.

Hamid Yazdan Panah, who leads Immigrant Defense Advocates, said he was frustrated that Democratic lawmakers opted to include what he called a “criminalizing exemption.”

“If they spent more time understanding the importance of legal resources, they would understand that it ultimately helps our state to invest in legal infrastructure and protect due process, especially when it’s being attacked in the manner that we see right now in the streets in L.A.,” he said. “The majority of the funding goes to long-term California residents. And California reaps the benefits of keeping households together and having a strong immigrant workforce that has work permits.”

Panah said he’s also worried that the syntax of the bill is sloppy, fearing that the language could be interpreted to mean that the funds may not be used to provide deportation defense for anyone at all.

Legislative staffers say that’s not the intention.

Though the Legislature is required to pass the budget by June 15, there are still two weeks in which they are expected to hammer out final language in talks with the governor before the new fiscal year begins July 1.

“The Legislature doubled down on investments in legal aid this year, because immigrant workers, students and parents need support more than ever in the face of Trump’s raids and terror,” said Nick Miller, communications director for Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas. “The Governor’s message from January regarding aid and felons, and any draft language, will be discussed during ongoing budget negotiations.”

In 2024, roughly $8 million of the Equal Access Fund was spent on immigration legal services, and of the nearly 42,000 low-income Californians who got legal help, more than 11,000 were immigration clients, according to State Bar officials. Additional funds for immigration legal aid flow through the state Department of Social Services.

One of the nonprofits that receives funding from the Equal Access program is the Oakland-based California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. Co-Executive Director Lisa Knox urged lawmakers to remove the restriction and once again allow groups like hers to serve anyone who needs a lawyer to fight deportation or apply for protection.

“Legal representation is the most important factor in whether someone facing deportation is able to remain in their community with their family,” she said. “At a time when the Trump administration is sending in the military to make sure ICE can violently detain as many people as possible in California, it is unconscionable that our state Legislature would pull the rug out from under people who need legal representation.”