The San Francisco Bay Area has long been a notable hub for Chinese immigrants, documented and undocumented.
It is not, however, a hub for Chinese-speaking immigration attorneys who handle deportation cases.
In fact, Mission Local, along with numerous knowledgeable sources, could only definitively identify three Chinese-speaking attorneys specializing in deportation defense, an undersized team serving hundreds of immigrants.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of clients we have nowhere to refer,” said Jose Ng, an immigrant rights program manager at Chinese for Affirmative Action.
At times, he has to tell desperate callers who reach him through the group’s immigrant hotline that he cannot move on with their case, because all three deportation attorneys on his referral list have no capacity.
“Right now, it’s very concerning, because you have to run against the time,” Ng added.
Perhaps hundreds of Chinese immigrants are now either going at it alone or, like other immigrant groups, hiring individuals who lack the qualifications to serve them appropriately, local nonprofits said.
Some, experts said, are turning to AI for help with asylum cases — a huge risk when small errors can mean the difference between staying put and being deported.
“It can be a life-or-death situation,” said Angela Chan, San Francisco’s assistant chief public defender.
Deportees may be returned to political persecution or domestic violence, or be dumped in dangerous prison conditions. The lives of their undetained family members could also suddenly be in peril, since it’s often the sole breadwinner who is detained.
Chinese undocumented immigration surged after the pandemic. In 2023 and 2024 alone, more than 60,000 Chinese residents arrived through Mexico, compared to just 2,143 in 2022.
The Bay Area is their third most popular destination, after New York and Los Angeles, in part because immigration court judges here are generally seen as more favorable to asylum-seekers.
There were at least 25,000 undocumented Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area’s nine counties as of 2019, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
But there are simply not enough Cantonese- or Mandarin-speaking attorneys. Several studies show access to counsel makes those facing deportation five times more likely to win their cases.
One obstacle, experts said, is the money.
‘Why would you want to help people for free and get paid less?’
One of the few lawyers who can help is Chenyu Wang, the lone Mandarin-speaking attorney at Jubilee Immigration Advocates, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides free legal services to immigrants in the Bay Area. Wang’s life has been especially hectic in the past two years.
Wang, who has been in the Bay Area since 2011, described the lack of attorneys with his skillset as a pipeline problem. Many law students with Chinese language skills are told by the community to aim for higher goals, such as a partnership in a big law firm.
Even the immigrants that Jubilee works with seem baffled by the career choices of the nonprofit’s attorneys. They’ll ask questions like, “‘Why would you want to help people for free and get paid less?’” said Wang.
Asian attorneys who do practice immigration law, adds Ng of the Chinese for Affirmative Action, tend to focus on more lucrative clients, like handling H-1B visas for tech giants.
But having a deportation lawyer who speaks a monolingual client’s language “is really critical, because you’re trying to tell your story and to have someone who can both understand it completely and then also, frankly, just relate on a more human level,” said Kelly M. Matayoshi, president of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area.
Especially for asylum-seekers, who must submit a personal statement giving their reasons for seeking asylum, nuances matter, both in court and in written documents.
“A lot of these are very technical,” said Ng. “It’s just impossible for you to use Google Translate to interpret or translate for the entire conversation.”
Amy Lee, Jubilee’s co-founder, is one of two Cantonese-speaking lawyers at the nonprofit (the other is Alexandra Wong). Over the last two years, she said, she has seen a sharp rise in calls from Chinese-speaking asylum seekers with immigration court cases.
Many of Lee’s female asylum-seeker clients are survivors of domestic violence in China. Their conversation with Lee in Cantonese is likely the first time they talk to anyone about the severe abuse and the trauma, Lee said.
This also holds true for the women seeking asylum under the Violence Against Women Act, individuals mistreated by spouses who are U.S. citizens.
“Most of them know some English,” said Wang. “But to talk about everything, they prefer to do it in Chinese.”
Cultural competency matters a lot, said Wang. “You have to have been to China recently to understand some things.”
For example, China has, in recent years, become a nearly cashless society, and so cutting off access to electronic payment systems has become an effective tactic to suppress dissidents.
Some of Wang’s clients write in their asylum claims that they fear that the Chinese government has turned off the WeChat Pay, Alipay or other accounts they use to pay for things on their phones.
“I wonder how many people in the U.S. understand how big of a deal that is,” said Wang. “I think a lot of people still think of China as this really backwards place.”
ChatGPT, misinformation and scammers fill the void
On a typical day, Wang fields several calls from Mandarin-speaking immigrants. But often, there’s not much he can do. Many have already filed their asylum applications with immigration courts and are looking for a lawyer to assist with the rest of the process.
The applications, however, are poorly done, Wang and Lee said. Some may leave out important context because they assume it’s obvious, others may use boilerplate language.
“They may have gotten help from ChatGPT, or they may have gotten help from some business in Chinatown that are not lawyers,” said Lee.
In the rapidly changing world of deportation proceedings, some immigrants’ fates hinge on the handiwork of unqualified legal advisors who demonstrate ignorance of “what the process looks like, what claims are meritorious, what the current state of the law is,” Lee says.
As a result, some who were detained entered the courtroom with no expectation of detention.
Chan of the Public Defender’s Office said she saw this a lot at the Asian Law Caucus. The immigration team there was “basically trying to clean up problems caused by an illegitimate legal provider.”
Ng recalled a recent conversation he helped interpret with a Mandarin-speaking asylum-seeker detained at the ICE field office at 630 Sansome St. The person told Ng that he was never able to speak directly to his immigration attorney. All communication went through a Chinese-speaking middleman.
Ng wasn’t able to figure out whether the attorney really existed or if anything had actually been filed.
Seeing one’s rights though ICE’s translation app
Amanda Maya, asylum program director at the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, described a horrific experience while volunteering as a pro-bono “attorney of the day” at the San Francisco Immigration Court this spring.
Maya was accompanying a Chinese immigrant to the elevator when three ICE agents grabbed the man and stated that he was under arrest. It was a shocking moment for both, as neither had expected the man to be at any risk of ICE detention.
“I think it’s very fair to say he could not understand what was happening,” said Maya.
After she confronted ICE, saying the man doesn’t speak English, ICE showed the immigrant his rights via their interpretation app. Maya saw no sign that the man she was walking with could read what was on the agent’s phone — or whether the man, who looked “really afraid,” could read at all.
“It felt very, very demoralizing at that moment,” she said. “If someone did speak the same language that he did, maybe they could have advocated for him more in that moment.”
Even if someone could have asked him if he could read what was on the phone, that might have helped, Maya said. But she couldn’t and neither — apparently — could anyone else.
Oh my goodnes! If only there was someone who was able to speak both Chinese and English, they wouldn’t even have to be an attorney, they would just have to translate for one. It’s too bad all we have is google translate and AI slop.
Hello, there are a few mandarin schools in the Bay Area that students can translate English to mandarin for asylum seekers that may do it voluntarily to complete their community service hours.
Is there a way to connect these attorneys with Mandarin/Catonese speaking volunteers? People want to help! Could the author possibly put a note about who needs the support and best ways to do it? This is clearly an emergency.
There are hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of interpreters who do. Just because the attorney’s themselves don’t isn’t really the full stop issue the headline implies. Yes it does have a cost, that’s inevitable, but there are phone-based tools for translation in realtime that cost nothing. Someone can figure this problem out. I daresay the issue for other less populous languages is a much larger disparity than Cantonese or Mandarin in the largely representative Bay Area.
I don’t think that rationalization justifies that fact that there is a huge problem for a very significant amount of people. As a person protesting and doing court observation regularly downtown, we Need people that speak Mandarin or Cantonese down at the courthouse for accompaniments at the very least. Having someone translating for them is a huge first step.
But there ARE hundreds and hundreds of interpreters that people can find and bring with them to court – and the problem isn’t limited to Chinese. In fact finding interpreters who speak C or M is much easier than finding them for other less represented languages. All you have to do is look. Even the courts have resource information with numbers to call. When people don’t do the minimum it’s unfortunate, but it’s not the problem you seem to think is “huge” quite, nor insurmountable at all. It just takes a modicum of effort. Would it be nice if the courts had someone standing by for every single language possible, yes sure it would. But that’s not realistic.