Immigrant Services Face Cuts Under Latest Proposed California Budget

The revised state budget includes about $33 million in proposed cuts to programs that fund free legal help for immigrants through contracted local service providers. These include legal services for unaccompanied minors, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, and immigrant students in the California State University system.

The budget also proposes cuts to in-home supportive services for undocumented immigrants receiving Medi-Cal.

One legal service program that could lose the bulk of its funding is the California State University Immigration Legal Services Project, which provides free legal help to immigrant students, staff, faculty, and recent graduates of the Cal State system. There are eight Cal State campuses in L.A., Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

“The program is integrated into existing Dream Resource Centers on the CSU campuses,” said Julie Mitchell, legal director with the Los Angeles-based Central American Resource Center, or CARECEN, which provides legal services for the program. “The program was kind of designed to be part of the many resources that immigrant and undocumented students can receive at Cal State universities.”

According to Immigrant Defense Advocates, a Sacramento-based immigrant policy group, the CSU program’s funding would be reduced from about $7 million annually to about $1.8 million.

Mitchell with CARECEN said this would decimate the program’s services; among those helped now are students who are renewing their deportation protection and work visas through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, as well as younger undocumented students who are presently barred from the program as it remains in litigation.

“We see just a huge need for our services,” she said. “For example, at some of our campuses, we have appointments booked out as far as a month in advance or sometimes more, booked solid … so for a program that is already fully at capacity, this would completely dismantle the program that’s already been built.”

Mitchell said that in this election year, with the future of DACA and other immigration policies uncertain, the proposed funding cut “is coming at a terrible time.”

Other proposed cuts

Immigrant policy advocates say other cuts to immigrant legal services would do away with some programs altogether, like a pilot program that provides child advocacy to unaccompanied minors, funded at close to $18 million. Also up for cuts is about $10 million in funding for legal services provided to immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, granted to nationals of particular countries that have experienced circumstances such as war or natural disaster.

Newsom’s May revision also proposes cuts to in-home caregiver services for Medi-Cal recipients without immigration status totaling close to $95 million, said Carlos Alarcon, a health and public benefits policy analyst at the California Immigrant Policy Center.

The In-Home Supportive Services program is currently available to Californians on full-scope Medi-Cal, and provides in-home assisted living services for seniors and the disabled.

This year, full-scope Medi-Cal was expanded to all undocumented Californians regardless of age; it was previously not available to those ages 26 to 49. Alarcon said it’s unclear how many undocumented immigrants presently receive IHSS benefits, but that “this would be a cut, they would not have access to it.”

Newson’s budget attempts to close both a remaining $27.6 billion budget shortfall this year and a projected $28.4 billion deficit next year. Newsom said in a statement last Friday that “we’re delivering a balanced budget over two years that continues the progress we’ve fought so hard to achieve, from getting folks off the streets to addressing the climate crisis to keeping our communities safe.”

State lawmakers must pass a budget bill by June 15.