California Immigration policy is once again on a collision course with Washington, as cities and counties across the state move in 2026 to pour fresh public money into legal defence for immigrants facing deportation under Donald Trump’s renewed enforcement drive, according to new reporting by CalMatters.
For context, California has been bankrolling immigrant legal support for a decade. The state created its Immigrant Assistance Programme, known as ‘One California’, in 2015 with a 45 million dollar budget to fund non-profits offering services including legal help, particularly after the Obama administration expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals scheme. That state programme expressly bars funds being used for people convicted of serious felonies and has been renewed annually, although it has also sparked political arguments over how tightly eligibility should be drawn.
Those long-running efforts are now being topped up at the local level. With the Trump administration stepping up immigration enforcement, CalMatters reports that a growing number of municipal and county governments are setting aside their own funds to help immigrants, as well as rapid response networks, build legal defences against deportation.
San Francisco and Alameda County are the latest to expand their local pots. When Trump threatened in October to increase Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Bay Area, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to add 3.5 million dollars to its existing defence fund. In March, Alameda County doubled a 3.5 million dollar fund it had previously set up.
Other jurisdictions have already moved in the same direction. Richmond, Los Angeles and Santa Clara County all run immigration defence funds. Meanwhile, Bay Area cities have joined forces to launch the Stand Together Bay Area Fund, a separate legal resource financed entirely by philanthropy rather than taxpayers.
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Although the headline rows over California immigration tend to happen in Sacramento and Washington, the frontline decisions are made in county chambers such as Santa Clara’s. Supervisor Susan Ellenberg told CalMatters that, in her view, paying for immigrant legal aid is a straightforward calculation about local self-interest, given that around 40% of Santa Clara County’s residents are immigrants.
‘We have a direct nexus and concern to people who are working, living, raising families, paying taxes, participating in our community and keeping our economy and our social fabric strong,’ Ellenberg said. ‘So our local dollars are being spent to protect local interests.’
Supporters of the funds argue they are also trying to rebalance a legal process that is structurally tilted against migrants. Caitlin Patler, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, told CalMatters the programmes are necessary because of the size of the immigrant population and the way the courts operate. Deportation cases are handled in civil, not criminal, courts, which means defendants do not have a guaranteed right to a free, court-appointed lawyer even though they are up against government attorneys.
‘I don’t think that anyone should be representing themselves in any courtroom when the government comes with an attorney every time,’ Patler said.
She noted that immigration judges have likened such hearings to deciding ‘life sentences in a traffic court setting’. Previous research backs up the impact of representation. A 2014 study by the Northern California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, cited by CalMatters, found that immigrants represented by lawyers from several Bay Area non-profits won 83% of their removal hearings. Two-thirds of detained immigrants, however, had no access to counsel at all.
California Immigration Funding Ramps Up After Trump’s Return
Local defence initiatives did not begin under Trump, but they accelerated sharply after his first election in 2016, when he campaigned on tougher border enforcement and broader efforts to deter immigration. New York City launched the first major pilot defence fund in 2013, followed by San Francisco in 2014. In Los Angeles, a 10 million dollar public–private fund, the Los Angeles Justice Fund, was created shortly after Trump’s 2017 inauguration under then mayor Eric Garcetti. That scheme was expanded in 2022 into RepresentLA, which continues to receive funding from the city, the county and philanthropic donors.
The same pattern is repeating after Trump’s return to the White House. A month before his second term began, Santa Clara County allocated 5 million dollars for activities linked to what it described as Trump’s targeting of immigrants. According to Ellenberg, the county has since increased that total to 13 million dollars. She said the Santa Clara fund is broader than many others, paying for a range of immigration-focused organisations, including the local Rapid Response Network, as well as legal defence, outreach, education and prevention work.
In September, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie appeared with the mayors of Oakland and San Jose to unveil the Stand Together Bay Area Fund, which aims to raise 10 million dollars for families affected by detentions and deportations. The fund is managed by the non-profit San Francisco Foundation and, at this stage, does not include city money.
‘My understanding is that their role is to support fundraising,’ the foundation’s spokesperson, Rachel Benditt, told CalMatters. ‘I do not believe that they will be donating money from the city budgets.’
Oakland mayor Barbara Lee, in a news release on the same initiative, said the fund is intended to pool contributions from individuals, businesses, faith groups and philanthropic partners for non-profits serving immigrant communities.
Alameda County supervisors have also committed some of their own discretionary public funds to support the regional effort. Three supervisors are diverting portions of their district budgets, with supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas pledging 50,000 dollars.
‘These dollars are one piece of a much larger fight,’ Bas said in a statement. ‘A fight for dignity, for rights, and for the future of our democracy.’
None of the officials cited suggested that local money will resolve the broader federal arguments over California immigration. What they are doing, instead, is choosing a side in how those arguments play out in courtrooms where, for many, the stakes are no longer abstract.
