The mayor’s office must cut $400 million in this year’s budget, but it won’t cut immigrant legal services and, Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office told Mission Local.
The city spent about $17.9 million this year on services such as deportation defense and a rapid response network that verifies immigration arrests and emergencies. Next year it is budgeting for $18.2 million.
“In this budget, we are standing up for San Francisco’s communities and our values,” Lurie said in a statement. “As we work to close a $600 million deficit and navigate cuts from the federal government, we are continuing to build on our investments in immigrant legal services because our immigrant community makes our city stronger.”
Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, the executive director of CARECEN, which runs the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, a non-profit that provides legal services to detained immigrants, commended the move.
“Today somebody got detained, our partners are responding, and we’d much rather be doing that than having to be at City Hall fighting for critical resources,” she said, speaking on Wednesday and referring to an immigration arrest in the Sunnyside neighborhood that day.
In addition to the city’s budgeted spending, officials have made several one-time grants since the November 2024 election to help bolster immigrant legal services.
That includes $878,000 approved by then-Mayor London Breed in 2024 (which Lurie declined to renew last year) and $3.5 million appropriated by the Board of Supervisors in October 2025, hours after President Donald Trump withdrew a threat to send a “surge” of federal agents to San Francisco.
The $3.5 million came from a $400 million fund the city set up as a buffer for any federal cuts. This year, the mayor is planning to pull at least another $1.86 million from that fund for immigrant legal defense. That’s enough to continue covering the Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative’s work, but is less than the $3.5 million from last year.
That has some worried.
“Not receiving these funds would be a huge step back in providing the adequate levels of legal, education and hotline staff at a time when immigration enforcement is increasing in our city,” said Laura Valdez, the executive director of Mission Action.
If that money does not come through, Valdez continued, her organization would have to lay off attorneys and paralegals hired by the San Francisco Immigrant & Legal Education Network and cut dispatchers on the Rapid Response Network hotline, which people can call to activate a cascade of services if they believe someone may have been arrested by immigration agents.
The funds could yet come through: The mayor will present his full budget proposal on June 1. Supervisors will then negotiate changes to the budget, which could include “add backs” for programs like those from Mission Action, and it will be finalized in late July.
Dugan-Cuadra is hopeful. “At the end of the day, if the shit hits the fan, San Francisco does end up generally responding.”