On any given day in San Francisco immigration court, you’ll find an immigrant pleading with the judge for time to find a lawyer. Sometimes the judge acquiesces. Sometimes they do not.
When it comes to providing legal representation in immigration court, San Francisco is the second-worst county of its size or larger in California. Only Santa Clara County, which includes the city of San Jose, fares worse.
San Francisco’s lack of representation boils down to lack of funding, said legal service providers.
That is hardly consolation for local immigrants.
Just 58.2 percent of San Francisco residents with pending immigration cases have their own attorney, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse or TRAC, a data institute out of Syracuse University that analyzed Department of Homeland Security court records.
That’s a far cry from the 86.4 percent of immigrants with legal representation in Sacramento County, which tops the list of 14 major California counties with 800,000 residents or more, or the 84 percent of immigrants who have an assigned lawyer in court in Los Angeles County.
Unlike criminal court, defendants in immigration court are not legally entitled to an attorney, even though the government is always represented.
This disparity has consequences. A nationwide study from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, which analyzed over 1.2 million deportation cases between 2007 and 2012, concluded that immigrants with an attorney were 15 times more likely to have a decision made in their favor than those without a lawyer. Those without an attorney only won in two percent of cases studied.
The Trump administration’s increasingly complicated and ever-changing immigration system has made immigrants in San Francisco even more vulnerable, particularly those seeking asylum from countries where their lives are in danger, advocate say. Faced with a lack of legal counsel about their risk of detention and deportation, some decide to stay away from court, work, school or any other place that might put them in the path of immigration agents, they dded.
Others try to hire a private attorney, though this can easily cost upwards of $100,000 for an asylum case. In San Francisco, like elsewhere across the country, scam attorneys and notaries have flourished.
For one 63-year-old immigrant from Nicaragua who came to the United States in the ’80s, it became so difficult and expensive to find a lawyer that, he said, he gave up looking, and instead has put his faith in God.
“Lawyers should be a little more conscious about not raising fees because people do not have money,” said the Nicaraguan immigrant, speaking in Spanish.
Those who cannot afford a private attorney seek pro bono legal representation which has long waitlists, or make do with legal advice, which amounts to far less than having a lawyer with you in court. The San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, a network of nonprofit legal service providers, has a database of immigrants who still need an attorney or legal services. As it stands, over 1,600 immigrants are in their system waiting for assistance.
In Los Angeles County, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), a nonprofit that serves as a conduit between immigrants needing representation and 83 different legal service providers, is one factor in the city’s high level of representation, according to Maritza Agundez, the director of contracts and programs at CHIRLA. By having one nonprofit that handles the administration of local, state and private funding, legal service providers can focus on the work without the stress of things like government compliance, said Agundez.
But another key factor, said Agundez, is that that both Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles have increased funding for immigrant legal help in recent years.
That is not the case in San Francisco. Shortly before former Mayor London Breed left office at the end of 2024, she gave a one-time grant of $878,000 to immigrant legal services. Her successor, Mayor Daniel Lurie declined to renew it the following year.
“In early 2025, after the last election, a lot of counties and the state put money toward removal defense, and San Francisco did not,” said Milli Atkinson, who runs the Attorney of the Day program, which works with unrepresented San Francisco immigrants.
San Francisco has received short-term budget supplements from the city of San Francisco for deportation defense legal work, but providers cannot take on new cases that may take several years without sustained funding.
How much does San Francisco fund legal services for immigrants?
Funding for immigrant legal services in San Francisco comes from two sources: the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (about 91 percent and a small portion from the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. Last fiscal year, MOHCD spent over $15 million on immigration legal services, $3.5 million of which was a temporary “budget supplemental” that a group of supervisors managed to introduce hours after President Donald Trump withdrew a threat to send a “surge” of federal agents to San Francisco.
The MOHCD told Mission Local that the city’s proposed funding for immigrant legal services in the coming fiscal year is $12,509,662, a decrease from last year because it will not include the supplemental funding.
Achieving full legal representation for the city’s immigrants, said Atkinson, from the San Francisco Bar Association, would require a budget of closer to 20 or 30 million over a period of 2-4, years which, in contrast, is about 3 percent of the total police budget ($822.8 million) from last year. “This is long-term work that needs to be sustained,” said Atkinson. “We are stopping and starting, hiring and firing, because they won’t just make this part of our regular contract,” she said.
The state Department of Social Services also provides funding for immigrant legal aid through grants – some for general immigrant services and some earmarked for “removal defense.” But local immigration help providers say the state prioritizes sending that aid to more rural parts of the state, such as the Central Valley and parts of Southern California.
Meanwhile, the state Department of Social Services, told Mission Local it allocates funding based upon census estimates of immigrant population.
Jordan Weiner, the interim executive director of La Raza Centro Legal, which provides legal services to immigrants in San Francisco, said she was shocked to find out that the county was so low on the list.
She said La Raza’s attorneys are not taking on any new clients in a “full scope” — meaning the attorney manages the case from start to finish — capacity because of the immigration court being in limbo, meaning that courts are closing, and policies and procedures are changing rapidly.
Weiner, like other legal service providers, wants the city and state to begin to budget for legal services for immigrants in local cities in a long-term and sustainable manner.
“If the federal government is going to be using its resources to do something as powerful as deporting someone” she said. “I think the state needs to provide more of a level playing field.”