Legal Defense Fund for Immigrants Could Begin Operating by February

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Léelo en español.


A fund that will provide access to legal representation to low-income immigrants living in Long Beach who are facing deportation came closer to becoming a reality on Nov. 4. The city council approved a two-year agreement with the Vera Institute of Justice to manage the fund with a 6-3 vote.

Long Beach will be joining Vera’s SAFE Cities Network, a group of cities and counties that have committed to providing legal representation to undocumented individuals. Other California jurisdictions in the network include Sacramento, Oakland/Alameda County, and Santa Ana.

The $250,000 set aside by the city for the Long Beach Justice Fund is part of the People’s Budget that was lobbied for by a coalition of community groups during the city budget hearings earlier this year. Additionally, Vera will match the city’s “seed” funds with up to $100,000 in grant money.

The Office of Equity and City Manager will now team up with Vera to issue a request for proposals and select the organization that will actually provide the legal services. If all goes smoothly, the fund will begin operating early as mid-February, according to Deputy City Manager Kevin Jackson.

In order to be eligible for the legal aid, a person must reside in Long Beach and have a household income below 200 percent of the federal poverty line—about $50,200 for a family of four.

Councilmember Lena Gonzalez (CD-1), who has spearheaded the fund’s implementation, pointed to Vera’s decades of experience and commitment of matching funds, as well as it’s “national perspective” as reasons for entering into the SAFE Cities Network.

Supporters framed the fund as a necessity in light of the Trump Administration’s hard line immigration policies.

Sarah Kim Pak, a fellow at the National Immigration Law Center, said during public testimony that she viewed the fund as correcting the “glaring imbalance” between the legal resources of federal prosecutors and many undocumented individuals, allowing the “anti-immigrant Trump deportation machine to blaze forward.”

Because deportation proceeding are civil, and not criminal, in nature, legal representation is not guaranteed for immigrants facing removal from the U.S. The consequences of deportation have in some cases proven to be dire.

Councilmembers Suzie Price (CD-3) and Stacy Mungo (CD-5) were the most vocal opponents to allowing Vera to manage the fund, ultimately voting against it along with Councilmember Daryl Supernaw (CD-4).

Pulling from her day job as a prosecutor with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, Price said she favored legal support for those convicted of low-level crimes but wanted “limitations” in place for those convicted of more serious crimes.

“If an individual is facing deportation because they were convicted of a qualifying criminal offense … than taxpayer dollars would not be used to assist that individual,” said Price, illustrating her desired restrictions.

Criminal offences cited by Price included: “murder, robbery, assault with a weapon, gang related shootings, and crimes of moral turpitude.”

At the meeting, Tania Karina Sawczuk, a Senior Program Associate with Vera, explained that if an individual is convicted of such crimes — and there was no reason to believe their conviction was mishandled — they would be disqualified from receiving legal defense assistance. Instead, she said, they would likely be given a consultation with an attorney who would inform them that they are without options and should accept the removal order.

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“The basis of [this fund] is to provide due process and fair legal representation … for immigration [cases],” said Jackson, who had a hand in crafting the agreement.

“There is a reality that our communities face, that our criminal justice system is flawed, and abuse does take place,” said Councilmember Rex Richardson (CD-9).

Deportations have hit both the Latino and Cambodian communities in Long Beach.

Phal Sok, who came to the city as an infant when his family fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, was convicted of second-degree robbery as a teen. After serving a lengthy prison sentence, he became an organizer for the Youth Justice Coalition, working with incarcerated juveniles. But his previous conviction led to him receiving a removal order in 2015 and later being detained. During the hearing on Nov. 4, Gonzalez noted that she had penned a letter in support of Sok’s successful bid to receive a pardon by Governor Jerry Brown, which allowed him to stay in the country.

Not as fortunate was Long Beach-resident José Alvarez, a father of six and business owner, who was deported to Mexico in 2016 because of a decades-old drug conviction after being pulled over for a broken headlight.

“This is a perfect example [of] where the deportation fund would have come in and helped him. He was living an exemplary life, paid his dues. Now there’s a broken family,” said Roberto Uranga (CD-7).

Immigrants with past criminal convictions were 74 percent of all arrests made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in 2017.

According to the Immigration Legal Resource Center, “For people whose convictions effectively close all doors to immigration relief, vacating the conviction in criminal court is the only way to preserve a chance of remaining in the United States.” One common reason that criminal convictions tied to deportations get overturned is that prosecutors in the case did not communicate to a defendant the effect a guilty plea will have on their immigration status.

ICE does not publish city-specific numbers on how many people are deported. However, Andrea Donado, who works within the Latino immigrant community as part of the the Greater Long Beach Interfaith Community Organization, said that in the average month she hears of at least two deportation cases involving local residents.

“We have a strong need for a fund like this .. this [fund] is not a guarantee that they are going to stay in our community, but it’s going to give them a bigger chance,” she said.

Like in the case of Alvarez, often times the person being removed is a family’s breadwinner, leading to their sons or daughters dropping out of school to find work. That continues a cycle of poverty that prevents upward mobility and ripples throughout the community, according to Donado.

Also what happens is that [the family] has to leave Long Beach. Sometimes they end up in San Bernardino, or wherever they can find cheaper housing,” Donado said.

“Deportation is a federal process [but] it does have an impact on local communities therefore it is the business of the city council,” said Richardson.

The legal defense fund is part of a larger strategy to protect the immigrant community in the city laid out in the Long Beach Values Act of 2018, which the council passed in March.

Additional reporting by Kevin Flores.

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition