New Bill Aims to Ensure Legal Help for Immigrants Facing Deportation

A group of Democratic lawmakers, led by East Bay Assemblymember Mia Bonta, is rolling out a bill on Tuesday that they hope will pave the way to ensuring legal representation for every California resident facing deportation.

If passed, the measure would make California the second state to commit to providing counsel (subject to funding) for everyone in immigration proceedings.

The move comes in response to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, which led to a quadrupling of immigration arrests nationally in the first nine months of last year. In Northern California, arrests more than doubled, even though a planned surge of federal immigration agents was averted at the last minute.

“People are literally being scooped up without due process rights, being separated from their families,” Bonta said. “And we have a record number of people in detention centers.”

California already has relatively robust legal aid for immigrants, channeling tens of millions of dollars in public funds to legal service providers, including a one-time $25 million approved by the legislature last year.

That has meant that 70% of Californians with pending immigration cases had an attorney as of the end of December, the highest rate of any state except Hawaii (which had 84% representation but just 1,435 cases total). Even so, more than 100,000 California immigrants fighting deportation did not have a lawyer’s help.

Bonta’s bill, AB 2600, aims to close that gap. It does not obligate a specific dollar amount to immigrant legal aid, but creates a framework to channel funds when the money is there. It builds off a state law passed last year that provides a right to counsel for children in immigration proceedings, expanding that to people of all ages, with priority for those in immigration detention.

The proposed language reads: “Subject to the availability of state funding, the state shall provide legal counsel to every covered individual that is not otherwise being provided counsel.”

That pledge to provide counsel should be a prod to put the necessary funding in the budget — not only for California lawmakers, but also for other states, said Liz Kenney, associate director at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, who advocates for universal representation around the country.

“Given California’s leadership on funding and supporting legal representation for immigrants, it’s an incredibly significant next step,” she said. “States across the country have always looked to California for leadership on this issue, so passing a right to counsel in California would significantly impact what other states are interested in exploring.”

For a decade, New York City has invested in universal representation for residents in immigration detention. And several California counties are putting extra resources into deportation defense. Lawmakers in both New York state and Congress have tried to pass such laws, but so far without success. In 2022, Illinois passed a law establishing a right to legal representation in immigration proceedings, but it has not yet been implemented.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees legal counsel for every person facing criminal charges, at government expense if necessary. However, for people fighting deportation in immigration court, federal law provides a right to counsel, but only if they can supply their own attorney. In practice, that means more than half — 57% at the end of 2025 — did not have a lawyer.

Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University shows that in nearly 1 million asylum cases decided in the first quarter of this century, immigrants with an attorney won asylum nearly 45% of the time, while those who were unrepresented won less than 15% of the time.

And immigration enforcement affects not only undocumented immigrants in California, said Bruno Huizar, supervising policy manager with the California Immigrant Policy Center. It has become a broad public safety concern, as legal immigrants and U.S. citizens have been arrested and even shot by immigration agents.

“Legal representation is a lifeline,” Huizar said. “We have seen people based on the color of their skin, the language they speak … federal agents are taking them, no matter their immigration status. So this is an incredibly urgent political issue.”

But Huizar, who advised Bonta’s office on the bill, acknowledged that new financial obligations are a heavy lift at a time when California policymakers are contending with a budget shortfall of between $3 billion and $18 billion.

“Given the budget deficit, [this bill] does not mandate funding,” he said. “Our hope is that we can pass this right here in the state of California, and year after year, build the political support we need to continue scaling up investments.”

Some state budget observers say California can’t afford to add additional spending obligations, at least without finding cuts in other areas. Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank, said lawmakers should look at the state budget holistically, rather than pushing individual items in isolation.

“Where my concern comes is not on this project per se, which in my own personal values I probably would prioritize highly,” he said. “But is this going to become another justification to further increase the tax burden here in the state, which is already excessive compared to the rest of the country, and which I think is already having a lot of deleterious impacts on our growth and our prosperity.”

But Bonta said expanding legal defense is not only the humane thing to do, but it’s also a way to ensure prosperity in a state where a third of the workforce is foreign-born.

“Our immigrant community is the economic lifeblood of not only the state of California, but the country,” she said. “So it’s incredibly important that we preserve that economic engine.”