What's at stake:
Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes immigration fellowship bill despite $7.5 million in state funding in this year’s budget. Advocates say the money in the budget isn’t required to go to the Central Valley or other rural or underserved regions.
Jamie Gomez’s work on a habeas petition helped free a man from immigration detention. But the case didn’t end when immigration enforcement released him.
A district court granted a temporary restraining order that led to the man’s release. Gomez then continued representing him in immigration court, with support from Centro La Familia, where his case remains ongoing.
The man was reunited with his family in Fresno, including his six U.S. citizen children, three of whom have disabilities. He had lived in the community for years before being detained during an ICE check-in.
Gomez was supervised under the Immigrant Justice Legal Fellowship, which helps organizations in the Central Valley, Central Coast, and Inland Empire train attorneys programs to defend immigrants at risk of deportation.
The initial program placed 19 fellows with 13 organizations throughout the three regions, providing more than 2,400 legal services across 39 counties.
“I feel very proud of the work that was done in that case,” said Laura Polstein, co-founder and managing attorney at Immigrant Legal Defense. “We co-counseled that case; both of our names are on it, and I feel confident that this particular fellow could go on and file another habeas petition in another case if needed with very minimal supervision and support because he did such an excellent job.
The program would have been permanent if the bill, SB 1194, by Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Merced, had been signed. But Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill on September 27, saying it is duplicative with other efforts by the state to fund immigration-related legal services.
The path out of immigration detention has narrowed significantly since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s administration. But attorneys in Fresno have used legal strategies in federal district courts, including habeas petitions, to seek the release of people who might otherwise have limited avenues to get out of detention.
Local immigration advocates are calling for dedicated funding and resources for underserved regions across California, saying opportunities like the fellowship can help train and retain young attorneys in removal defense.
What is the Immigrant Justice Legal Fellowship?
Gomez, born in Tulare County, was raised in Fresno, and attended San Joaquin College of Law before joining the fellowship in September 2023 through August 2026.
He applied to the fellowship which was created to build legal capacity in underserved regions through training and mentorship for attorneys and organizations.
“It allowed people like myself to take my time, pass the bar and be given time for that hands-on training that I wouldn’t have been getting from the beginning,” Gomez said. “I might have been a research clerk, or just somebody who was more or less filling out forms in a regular immigration law office, as opposed to somebody in the fellowship who, from day one, was learning removal defense, was in court, writing motions and all of that.”
Across the first two cohorts, 15 of 18 participants became attorneys, and 13 remained practicing in their service areas. Two fellowship alumni became Padilla lawyers in the Fresno County Public Defender’s Office, handling criminal cases involving immigrants.
The fellowship was first proposed as a pilot in 2019, was approved in that year’s state budget, but did not launch until 2021 because of delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first two cohorts lasted three years. A third cohort is funded for January 2027 through the end of 2028 and will use a two-year model focused solely on removal defense.
The fellowship helped organizations qualify for California Department of Social Services funding, which requires three years of providing removal defense. Advocates say that requirement can make it harder for newer organizations in underserved communities to access state resources and for young attorneys to find jobs in the communities they want to serve.
Gomez said there’s no shortage of attorneys raised in the Central Valley, but many move to either San Francisco or Los Angeles. This fellowship gave him the opportunity to stay.
Advocates say veto underscores rural legal representation challenges
In Newsom’s veto message, he pointed to $7.5 million already provided for the fellowship in the 2026-27 state budget, arguing that the bill was unnecessary.
Jackie Gonzalez, co-executive director of Immigrant Defense Advocates, a co-sponsor of the bill, disagreed. She said the fellowship was originally created and advocated for as a pilot, but its success shows why it should become permanent.
“The veto, issued late Sunday evening, underscores the Newsom administration’s failure to acknowledge grassroots-led solutions developed by rural communities and sends the message that these regions, and the immigrant communities that call them home, can be ignored without consequence or accountability,” read an email statement shared by Gonzalez on behalf of the Immigrant Defense Advocates on the veto.
Gonzalez said the budget language does not specifically require the funding to go to underserved and under-resourced regions like the Central Valley. She said that could give the state broad discretion over where the money goes.
“Rural and underserved regions do not simply need a one time allocation of more dollars somewhere within California’s immigration-services system,” the email statement read. “They need attorneys, experienced organizations, training, mentorship, and an intentional pathway for communities that have historically received too little legal-services investment to build permanent capacity of their own.”
A big gap in removal defense services exists in the Central Valley
Adriana Gomez, program manager in removal defense at the Education and Leadership Foundation, was part of the first cohort in February 2021 and ended in December 2024 through the Community Justice Alliance.
The fellowship was Adriana’s first legal fellowship, and she said the mentorship and support from participating organizations were among the most valuable parts of the experience. She received individual mentorship with attorneys whose done removal defense work for decades.
She graduated from law school in 2019 but has not passed the bar. She said the fellowship nevertheless helped her obtain full accreditation through the Department of Justice, allowing her to represent people in immigration court.
She said many barriers in removal defense exist in the Central Valley, including its shortage of attorneys, leaving immigrants vulnerable to improper legal advice from notarios, who are not authorized to practice law.
The geographic distance to immigration courts adds another barrier, she said, with some Central Valley residents having to travel hours to places such as Concord or, previously, San Francisco.
The fellowship was designed, in part, to address the lack of experienced immigration attorneys who stay in areas such as the Central Valley, Gonzalez, with Immigrant Defense Advocates, said.
The goal is to encourage attorneys to return to and serve their home regions, “and ultimately to make their communities stronger, safer, and able to thrive. ”
Gonzalez, who previously practiced removal defense in the Bay Area, said the need for attorneys in the Central Valley was evident when people traveled long distances simply to receive immigration legal consultations.
“People would drive from the Central Valley just to do a free consultation with an immigration attorney,” Gonzalez said. “Both because they didn’t have the dollars to hire a private one, but also because so many of the legal resources they would have access to were like notaries and not actually lawyers. And when you’re in immigration court, you really need the assistance of a lawyer.”
Gonzalez pointed to the Bay Area as an example of how sustained investment in nonprofit immigration legal services can expand the number of attorneys available to represent immigrants.
“We see an increase in people’s due process rights, in the rate of representation,” Gonzalez said. “We see less people be defrauded by notarios or other immigration scams when they are at particularly vulnerable moments of their lives.”
Some organizations that do not receive removal-defense funding continue to provide only limited immigration services, said Xavier Vazquez Baez, director of immigration services at Centro La Familia.
“When the fellowship started, we were in a different political scenario,” Vazquez Baez said. “Two years later, things have changed, so that’s where the pool of expertise comes, and be smart about the cases that we take.”
Vazquez Baez said the experience fellows gain allows them to eventually handle cases more independently, while also giving organizations the capacity to evaluate which cases they can realistically take on.
The program has supported around 30–40 families at Centro la Familia, including detained clients and mixed-status families, through bond, habeas petitions, court representation, referrals, and rights education.
Vazquez Baez said the fellowship also helped Centro La Familia build relationships with other organizations and share information about cases and enforcement trends across different parts of the Central Valley.
“Stockton is very different than Fresno and Fresno is very different than Bakersfield,” Vazquez Baez said. “We want to make sure that we sit in those circles, and that’s what the fellowship did to our organization. It allows us to have a seat at these bigger tables where we were not there yet.”
