Who Represents Unaccompanied Migrant Kids in Immigration Court

• A California lifeguard and the boy he rescued off the coast of Santa Cruz last month were reunited at the White House yesterday, as the president honored both as heroes.
• Governor Gavin Newsom has set a goal to add 2.5 million new units to California’s housing stock by 2030.
• A state bill heading for a final vote as early as this week would permanently extend a fund to help oil industry workers affected by California’s transition away from fossil fuels.
• A federal judge in Oakland is weighing whether a Trump administration plan to replace a network of seasoned legal aid organizations with new groups is an adequate way to represent unaccompanied children in immigration court.

Every eight years, state housing regulators give cities and counties across California an especially dreaded homework assignment: Make a plan for a bunch of new homes.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration assigns localities goals to hit at four different affordability levels. Collectively, the numbers represent the housing department’s best estimate of the number of new homes needed to match any expected population growth and to chip away at the state’s decades-in-the-making shortage of affordable places to live.

But, less than a third of cities and counties are on track to permit enough “above moderate” units, the category that typically refers to market-rate housing, according to data submitted by locals to the state housing department.  

Only five jurisdictions in the entire state are permitting at a pace to hit all four income targets. Four are the lightly populated unincorporated bits of small, mostly rural counties: Plumas, Napa, Yolo and Mono. The fifth is Placerville, a town of roughly 11,000 people in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento.

A fund to help oil industry workers affected by California’s transition away from fossil fuels could be permanently extended as early as this week, if AB 2157 passes.

‘The Displaced Oil and Gas Worker Fund pays up to $15,000 dollars for education, or on the job training to transition to other industries. The program is currently set to end July 1st, 2027.

The fund aims to help the state’s oil workers, who have reeled from refinery closures in the state. From 2020 to 2021, two refinery closures led to more than 600 full time workers losing employment. In April of this year, 282 Valero employees lost their jobs when the oil giant closed its Benicia refinery.

Advocates for oil and gas workers are urging lawmakers to make the fund –which sunsets next year–permanent. The legislature has until the end of the month to decide.

Legal aid groups said they will continue to represent unaccompanied immigrant children in the Bay Area even after the Trump administration shifted federal funding away from seasoned service providers to a controversial anti-trafficking group.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded a $158 million contract — which could grow to $244 million — to Our Rescue, a Utah-based anti-human-trafficking group whose founder was accused of sexual exploitation and whose current director led Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during the first Trump administration. The group touts its expertise assisting law enforcement with sting operations, but advocates say it lacks experience representing children in immigration court.

Katrina Logan, executive director of Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, said her team of lawyers and social workers is not walking away from the 33 children they represent, even though their contract funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expired July 31.

“Our attorneys have been doing this type of law for many years. They’ve developed the expertise,” Logan said. “They understand how to support clients. So it’s definitely tough to be losing this funding.”

In a declaration last week, the government said it was looking for additional contractors to provide legal representation for kids and trying to work out a transitional contract with the Acacia Center for Justice (which holds the master contract on behalf of Community Legal Services ) to “support an orderly transition of cases to new legal service providers, including Our Rescue.”