LA City Council OKs expansion of legal services for immigrants

After a brief discussion, the Los Angeles City Council Tuesday approved a motion seeking to expand the use of funds to cover additional legal services through RepresentLA, a $4 million program aimed at providing free legal services for the city’s immigrant community.

The motion instructs the city’s Community Investment for Families Department and other relative offices to work with the LA County Office of Immigrant Affairs to prepare an amended memorandum of understanding to add detained and nondetained merits-blind removal defense to the list of legal services provided to the city’s immigrant community.

The motion, introduced by members Hugo Soto-Martinez and Curren Price, was approved in a 8-4 vote.

On June 2, the council’s Civil Rights, Equity, Immigration, Aging and Disability Committee OK’d the motion in a 4-1 vote. Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez voted against it.

Rodriguez called for a separate vote on the motion Tuesday morning prior to the council’s vote. She said the city has already “engrossed ourselves in this work and committed ourselves … that we want to represent individuals that are in the process or under duress of deportation.”

However, the councilwoman said she could not support this policy because “I can’t let it be a catch-all to supporting or potentially serving any individuals that perhaps are engrossed in, charged or convicted of any violent felonies that hinder our public safety.”

Soto-Martinez said the motion was more about “universal representation, not creating a narrative that pits immigrant families against each other.”

Councilman Bob Blumenfield said he was “torn” about whether the city should allow the prioritization of limited funds or push for universal representation. Blumenfield ultimately voted against the motion.

Price said RepresentLA and its predecessor program the LA Justice Fund, which started in 2017, have been a crucial source for the city’s undocumented community facing deportation.

“More than $59 billion in Los Angeles County’s GDP comes from undocumented immigrants, yet more than two-thirds of people who appear in immigrant court in LA County face a judge or prosecutor with no lawyer to represent them,” Price said. “There’s a huge need for legal help in immigration courts across the country for due process because it should belong to everyone.”

Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson concurred with Price that the city “runs on immigrants.”

“This is one really small opportunity for us to say to the immigrant community that we’re going to have your back,” Harris-Dawson said. “We want to do you a solid because we recognize that the immigration system under Trump and Biden is still woefully broken.”

Rodriguez reiterated the need to ensure legal representation for the city’s immigrant community, but said she wanted to do so in a way that honors “those hard-working individuals” who “don’t injure or harm any other individuals.”

RepresentLA is a “relatively small program that will always be inadequate to meet the vast needs of the immigrant community in this city,” Council President Paul Krekorian added.

Krekorian agreed with Rodriguez that the focus of the program should be on helping the “hard-working immigrant community” and not those “who have faced criminal charges of a severe nature.”

“They are entitled to a defense. They are entitled to representation,” Krekorian said. “But the city’s taxpayers aren’t the ones who should be the primary funder of that representation.”

Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez doubled down on her support for the motion.

“Do we not realize that the criminal justice system is racist? That we’re putting all the onus on the people that have been criminalized instead of taking a step back and realizing that, yes, some people need to be held accountable,” Hernandez said. “But also this system has come for our communities.”

“We cannot continue and I will not allow us to continue to talk about ‘good immigrants’ versus ‘bad immigrants,’ hard-working immigrants versus not-hard-working immigrants because that’s now how the world plays out,” she added.

Council members Krekorian, Rodriguez, Blumenfield and Traci Park voted against the motion.

“I would rather have our money go as far as it can go,” Councilman Tim McOsker said. “I’d like us to spend our money without us making a judgment about who we’re spending the money on and trust the system that will come out with good results.”