The Bay Area’s network of pro-bono immigration lawyers won’t receive needed city funding to release people from detention until late next year, according to Hillary Ronen, director of La Raza Centro Legal. The delay means Bay Area immigrants will languish in detention because the network cannot meet demand.
The Bay Area Habeas Network, which consists of nine Bay Area legal nonprofits and public defenders’ offices, aims to file emergency habeas corpus petitions for every immigration arrest in the area. Those petitions can quickly release someone from detention, often within hours.
On Tuesday in Santa Rosa, for example, three vehicles surrounded a Mexican-born father and tow-truck driver as he sat in his car in a parking lot. About half-a-dozen masked officers in vests marked “POLICE ICE” exited their cars, drew their guns, pulled him out and handcuffed him, according to his attorney and court filings.
The man was taken to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s San Francisco holding cells at 630 Sansome St., where a group of attorneys filed a habeas petition seeking his release.
A federal judge ordered his release the same day. He is now back home with his 18-year-old daughter and wife, a U.S. citizen.
But those petitions require a team of round-the-clock attorneys to interview immigrants in detention and write legal arguments. They monitor arrests and quickly step in to file petitions.
The Bay Area Habeas Network, which has freed at least 49 Bay Area residents arrested by ICE in the last five months, asked San Francisco for $250,000 in August to contribute to this work.
After inquiries from Mission Local, the mayor’s office said the request will be considered as part of next year’s budget process. But that funding would not arrive until September 2027, said Ronen, the former District 9 supervisor.
“The emergency is now,” she said. “We need to challenge every illegal arrest of our neighbors by ICE, today.”
The demand is significant: 116 habeas petitions have been filed in San Francisco’s Northern District court between the start of President Donald Trump’s term and July 1, 2026. But according to federal data from the U.C. Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, 3,870 immigrants were arrested across 18 major Bay Area cities in that time, meaning thousands likely went without a petition to challenge their detention.
Santa Clara County has already committed $250,000 to hire one more attorney, according to the network. San Francisco’s contribution would also mean an additional lawyer.
San Francisco already funds several nonprofits that are members of the network directly, but not the network itself.
The request comes as immigration arrests surge in other parts of California. Though there has not been a surge locally, arrests across major Bay Area cities rose 81 percent between July 2025 and July 2026, according to a Mission Local analysis of federal data released by U.C. Berkeley.
How does the Habeas Network respond to arrests?
A habeas petition asks a federal judge to decide whether the government is holding someone lawfully. Attorneys argue that ICE arrested people without a warrant, for example, and subsequently win their release from detention.
While winning doesn’t end a person’s immigration case, it does let them fight from home instead of a detention center.
Speed is everything when it comes to filing habeas petitions: If a petition is not submitted quickly, ICE can move a detainee out of Northern California. Once that happens, a petition can no longer be filed in San Francisco’s federal court.
“ICE is weaponizing geography against immigrants,” said Jordan Weiner, an immigration attorney at La Raza Centro Legal and one of the founding members of the Bay Area Habeas Network.
One immigrant with pre-existing medical conditions was arrested near the Highland Hospital in Oakland, for example, and lawyers were unable to find him in the ICE locator before he was transferred to Texas and then deported.
When someone calls one of the regional Rapid Response Networks to report an arrest, the hotline notifies the network and the nonprofit California Collaborative of Immigrant Justice sends an attorney or volunteer to the San Francisco ICE field office. The attorney then interviews the detained person and gathers facts about their case.
Meredith Sullivan, an attorney with Centro Legal de La Raza in Oakland, spent last Tuesday on the sixth floor of that office sitting across a glass wall from her clients and interviewing them, including the tow-truck driver from Mexico.
“It’s very sobering, and it’s extremely unfair. You’re trying to get as much info as possible with a time crunch,” she said.
Sullivan then shared those facts with the network of attorneys, who wrote up a habeas petition with a legal argument pushing for release. Once the petition is filed, a federal judge reviews it and, if they accept it, orders the immigrant released, usually within hours.
The network has filed 49 petitions total for 57 Bay Area residents since the network began on May 1. Over 90 percent of them were ordered immediately released, according to materials shared by the creators of the network.
“If we didn’t get to these individuals, then they would be in a detention center in the middle of a desert, or deported to a third country,” Ronen said.
The network says it needs more funding
Ali Saidi, who leads immigration work at the Contra Costa County Public Defender’s Office, said the network does not have the lawyers to meet demand. The attorneys writing habeas petitions need to be “cranking out a complex legal motion” and cannot also be at the court gathering facts.
“We’re not able to cover them all,” said Jennifer Noris, an immigration defense attorney in the same office.
Ronen said she met with Supervisor Jackie Fielder’s office, the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs and Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office on Aug. 26 to make the request.
Ronen said the city’s contribution would likely come as a budget supplemental, a one-time bucket of funding that must be approved by the Board of Supervisors.
City staff was receptive, Ronen said, but she heard nothing until Oct. 15, after Mission Local inquired about the funding. The mayor’s office then said it would consider it, but only next year.
What the network truly needs, said Shira Levine, co-founder of the network and former immigration judge, is a regional response. Santa Clara has funding through June 2027 at least, and San Mateo has almost finalized its own contract. Napa and Sonoma counties both made “soft commitments,” according to the network.
But “were there to be greater levels of enforcement,” as threatened last year during President Trump’s aborted immigration surge in October, the network would be critical, Levine said.
“It’s impossible to flip a switch” and quickly hire the needed lawyers, she added.