Fresno council to consider $1M legal service fund for immigrants amid ICE surge

The Fresno City Council will consider allocating $1 million to cover legal defense costs for the city’s immigrant residents in need in response to an ongoing surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests across the region.

Councilmember Miguel Arias is bringing forward a resolution at this Thursday’s City Council meeting to re-establish the city’s Immigration Legal Defense Fund. Over 20 business owners, education leaders, immigrant advocates and organization leaders joined Arias at a news conference Monday to urge support for the program.

“The reckless approach to immigration enforcement have been taking our city under siege and has been creating a terrorist feeling for many of our communities,” Arias said. “And the one thing that we’ve heard clearly from our immigrant communities is that they want the city to help. They want us to act. The one way we can act and we can help is by making resources available to those impacted by these immigration raids.”

The proposal directs the City Manager’s Office to prioritize identifying available funds through the mid-year budget process. The fund would be administered by the City Attorney’s Office, and the legal services would be provided through qualified outside legal service providers, according to the resolution.

The city set aside $200,000 in public funds for the same program in 2022, spearheaded by then-Councilmember and current county Supervisor Luis Chavez, and succeeded in helping some immigrants avoid deportation, The Fresno Bee previously reported.

Jesus Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, said funding for legal aid for immigrants in Fresno is urgent.

“We have in the Central Valley as a whole about 900,000 immigrants, but the legal infrastructure that exists in the Central Valley as a whole is very limited, and I would say very inadequate,” he said.

Martinez and Arias emphasized immigrants’ contribution to the region’s economy.

“Immigrants, whether you’re documented or undocumented, you’re a taxpayer,” Arias said.

Arias and others at the press conference compared the proposal to other emergency funds the city has provided to different groups of residents, like essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Arias said that while $1 million would not be enough to cover the full need, it’s an important start.

“So this is their money; it is their resource, and we are simply providing it to provide some temporary relief during this crisis, which is not their doing,” Arias said.