What's at stake?
The proposal comes amid a pre-midterm election surge in immigration enforcement across California that hasn’t spared families in Fresno or the Central Valley.
The Fresno City Council will decide this week whether to set aside a record amount of funding for legal support for the city’s immigrant residents as a surge in immigration enforcement continues to rattle the Central Valley.
Councilmember Miguel Arias is sponsoring a resolution at this Thursday’s Fresno City Council meeting to allocate $1 million toward an Immigration Legal Defense Fund.
The resolution directs the city to find the funding through the mid-year budget process, which happens annually between the months of November and January, Arias said at a news conference Monday.
The allocation will likely come from savings associated with unfilled staff positions in the city over the course of the budget year so far, the councilmember said.
The Fresno City Attorney’s Office would administer the fund, city documents say, while the legal defense services will be handled “through qualified outside legal service providers.”
“We recognize it’s not enough,” Arias told reporters on Monday. “But I do believe it is a start and is the right decision to make.”
It’s not the first time the council has taken up funding legal aid for the city’s immigrant residents facing threats of deportation, although Arias’ resolution would multiply a prior investment by five.
In 2021, the council at the time voted 5-2 to allocate $200,000 toward a legal defense fund for immigrants. Several sitting councilmembers voted in favor of the allocation at the time — specifically, Nelson Esparza, Tyler Maxwell and Arias — while one sitting councilmember, Mike Karbassi, voted against it.
That came after a failed 2017 effort to launch a city fund that a council majority shot down, although community organizations stepped up in their stead, raising more than $125,000 to help immigrants access legal aid, according to Fresno Bee archives.
The Office of Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer didn’t return a request for comment on the proposed allocation.
Arias likened the fund to the emergency aid local governments provided for residents during the pandemic.
“We are simply providing (the funding) to provide some temporary relief during this crisis,” he said, “which is not their doing and (is) out of our control as a city.”
Advocates underscored the urgency of the funding for legal aid on Monday, including Jesus Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative (CVIIC).
In an interview with Fresnoland following the news conference, Martinez said the funding could help address a longstanding shortage of legal resources in the region, which he described as “a chronic problem.”
Immigration legal service providers were already stretched to capacity before immigration enforcement intensified in 2025, he said.
The Central Valley also has a smaller roster of providers and attorneys compared with other regions like the Bay Area, while nonprofits here also struggle to secure funding for these critical resources, Martinez added.
“We expect and we want the local governments here in the Central Valley to also be conscious of the fact that immigrants are important members of our communities, our societies,” Martinez said. “We are Fresno. We are California. This is also our home.”
The investment would be an important step toward strengthening services for a region with more than 900,000 immigrants and more than 500,000 children with at least one immigrant parent, Martinez said.
Dedicated legal service providers in Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton and Modesto are necessary to serve families across the region, Martinez said, making local government investment critical to expanding access to legal assistance.
Martinez added that he hopes the city learns from its previous efforts to fund immigration legal defense. In 2017, local organizations were the ones pushing for Fresno to establish an immigration legal defense fund as enforcement increased during President Donald Trump’s first administration.
At the time, nonprofit providers lacked attorneys with experience in deportation defense, forcing them to collaborate with organizations in the Bay Area to assist affected families.
Even when the city approved $200,000 for the fund about two years later, Martinez said the money was awarded to a private law firm rather than used to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations.
For the latest proposed investment to have a lasting impact, Martinez said the city should prioritize a model that supports collaboration between private attorneys and nonprofit immigration legal service providers. Strengthening nonprofit organizations’ capacity to hire staff and develop expertise in deportation defense would allow them to serve more families, he said.
“It’s important for the Central Valley as a whole, and here in Fresno in particular, to consider that immigrants should be welcome to our city and our region,” Martinez said. “Because the economy of our nation, state and region relies heavily on immigrant labor.”
Sukaina Hussain, deputy executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center (CIPC), was part of the efforts to pass a legal defense fund in 2017 because of the historic lack of legal representation available for many immigrants in court.
“We saw a massive increase in ICE activity in the Central Valley, which we were very much not ready for, and it happened quickly and snuck up on us,” Hussain said. “At that time, we quickly mobilized folks around developing the Rapid Response Network, which is still the Valley Watch Network to this day.”
Hussain said the first failed launch for the fund was missing accountability and transparency about how the funding was being spent, as the organizations “did not see that last time.”
Now, Hussain believes that the city council will vote in favor of the fund because of “the increased activity from ICE and the way that there is just rampant racial profiling of folks.”
“Our elected officials are really seeing that, and the destruction that it causes in our communities and for our families, it’s tearing the communities apart, impacts our economy, and impacts the social fabric of our city as a whole.”
