For the First Time, LA Public Defenders Will Defend Clients in Immigration Court

This article was first published by the nonprofit newsroom LA Public Press on December 1, 2025 and is republished here with permission.

A few weeks ago, Giselle said, her friend had been driving an intoxicated friend home late at night.

“That person left an open can in her back seat, and she didn’t realize it,” she said. “Police pulled her over for no reason and called it a DUI without even doing the tests.”

Charges were dropped and her friend was released from jail, Giselle said, but she didn’t get to go home.

“ICE was waiting,” said Giselle, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisal from federal authorities. “Now she’s in Mexico, and her husband and kids are all here.”

For immigrants who get caught up in the criminal justice system, the conclusion of their case doesn’t necessarily mean their ordeal is over. Instead, in LA County, as with many other places in the country, some have been subject to continued detention and a trip to immigration court, where the Public Defender office can no longer help them with their case.

That last part, however, is about to change.

For the first time in its 111-year history, the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office will be able to represent people in immigration court. A new unit will screen individuals for immigration representation, offer guidance and referrals and, for those who qualify, provide direct legal defense in immigration proceedings through in-house immigration attorneys.

Between 2010 and 2014, more than 18,500 people — many of whom had already completed their sentences — were held past their release dates because they had immigration detainers. These detainers are requests from ICE asking local jails to keep someone in custody longer than the law allows so federal agents can take them into immigration custody.

In 2012, that system was challenged in a lawsuit known as Roy v. County of Los Angeles, arguing that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), which oversees the county jails, violated both state law and the Fourth Amendment by detaining people solely on the basis of an ICE request, without a warrant or probable cause of a crime.

The county eventually settled the case. As part of the agreement, LASD officials were forced to rewrite their policies so that immigration detainers could no longer justify extended detentions. The county also agreed to pay $14 million to those who had been unlawfully held.

Roy v. County of Los Angeles ultimately defined three groups of people harmed by the policy: immigrants who were held past their lawful release dates solely because of an ICE detainer, those who would have been released on bail but were kept in custody because of an immigration hold and immigrants who were denied bail altogether.

But many of the victims entitled to compensation could not be found. The unclaimed funds, called cy pres funds, cannot be returned to the agency responsible for the harm; instead, they must support work that benefits similarly affected communities.

Now, according to Los Angeles County Assistant Public Defender Graciela Martinez, those funds are financing the new removal defense unit within the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office — one that operates outside the office’s traditional criminal practice. The unit will take on federal deportation cases, a space public defenders normally do not enter under current law. The distinction matters: the Sixth Amendment guarantees a right to counsel only in criminal proceedings, leaving immigrants in civil immigration court without a government-appointed attorney.

While representation is a significant part of the new effort, according to Martinez, the unit’s responsibilities extend beyond it. Community members will be screened to determine whether they qualify for full legal defense, and even those who do not will receive guidance, referrals, and information about their options. The office is also still navigating whether any portion of the cy pres funds can be used to pay immigration bonds for people detained in ICE facilities.

“The public defender’s office is a crucial backstop. If there were more funding, more fellows could be out there doing this work,” said Ingrid Eagly, co-director of UCLA Law School’s Criminal Law and Policy Consortium.

LA Public Press requested an interview with the inaugural fellow, Niki Nguyễn, through both UCLA Law and the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office. UCLA Law directed questions to the Public Defender’s Office, which confirmed that Nguyễn would not be available for an interview before publication.

For Martinez— a 31-year veteran attorney who helped drive the Roy litigation — the unit marks a kind of institutional reckoning. “The leftover cy pres funds allow us to serve people like them — people who were impacted but cannot be identified,” she said. “This is about looking at people as individuals — not as criminals, not as monsters.”

The path to this moment began well before the landmark 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky, which required defense attorneys nationwide to warn clients when a criminal case could affect their immigration status. “We didn’t even call ourselves ‘crimmigration’ people back then, but now we do,” said Martinez, who is also the first Latina and first foreign-born individual to lead the California Public Defender’s Association (CPDA).

The term crimmigration refers to the increasingly inseparable intersection of criminal law and immigration law. In this space, a single arrest, charge, or conviction can trigger life-altering immigration consequences far beyond the criminal courtroom.

What Padilla v. Kentucky eventually mandated was already taking shape inside LA County’s public defender’s office. Martinez said she had already been warning clients that a plea could trigger deportation or other immigration consequences since 2002, eight years before Padilla. She said she was mentored by Katherine Brady, an attorney widely regarded as a pioneer of “crimmigration.” Together, they helped create some of the earliest training materials still used by public defenders nationwide.

Despite that groundwork, enforcement often advanced more rapidly than safeguards. At one point, Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the nation, was holding more immigrants on ICE detainers than any other county in the nation — more than most states, according to the ACLU. Whether that volume reflects the county’s sheer size remains unclear. Martinez recalls that during the years covered by Roy v. County of Los Angeles (2010-2014), she repeatedly called jail staff to insist that clients be released, reminding them there was no legal basis to keep anyone in custody. “And still,” she said, “they would hold people until ICE arrived.”

An uneven landscape

As the new removal-defense team takes shape, its arrival also exposes the uneven terrain of public defense across California. The state’s 58 counties operate independently, with varying levels of funding, political will and willingness to address immigration consequences. “There are counties that are very anti-immigrant, and they’re not going to fight for this,” said Christopher Punongbayan, the executive director of California ChangeLawyers, a statewide foundation that funds early-career lawyers and advocates, with a focus on expanding access to justice for marginalized communities. “We look at where the need is.”

In Ventura County, more than 100,000 people commute to and from Los Angeles each day, moving between jurisdictions with vastly different levels of immigrant legal protection — differences that became especially visible this summer. In August, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors declined to expand its immigrant legal defense program, leaving a gap that city leaders in Oxnard chose to fill themselves. In response, the Oxnard City Council approved up to $600,000 in matching funds over three years to support an additional Ventura County public defender — a commitment that will take effect only if the county agrees to participate.

Ken Rozell, the city’s chief assistant attorney, said the proposal is intended to bolster support for the immigrant community, though the specifics are still being worked out. “We don’t dictate how the Public Defender’s Office would use that position,” Rozell said. “But it’s really to provide funding so they can assist in the way that the public defender can assist with those immigration issues.” LA Public Press has reached out to the Ventura County Board of Supervisors for comment and to ask about a timeline for a decision but had not received a response by publication.

“This is about due process,” Oxnard City Manager Alexander Nguyen said in a recorded livestream. For local organizers and families, the decision underscored their argument that cities can act even when counties refuse.

That local momentum reflects a broader shift across California. At the state level, data from the California Immigrant Policy Center shows that it was largely during the first Trump administration—amid an escalation in federal immigration enforcement—that California significantly strengthened its immigrant legal-defense infrastructure. That effort deepened with the 2019 Budget Act, which created the state’s first immigration legal fellowship to expand the pipeline of removal-defense attorneys in regions that need them most.

Even with new state funding, the gap between enforcement and representation remains stark. Los Angeles County’s removal-defense unit is a meaningful step, but it enters a system where demand far exceeds capacity. According to the Vera Institute, of the more than 450,000 people ordered removed in immigration court over the past 12 months, roughly 75 percent had no legal representation.

The reality behind those numbers is visible in daily life. Immigration arrests continue in homes, parking lots and near schools, fueling constant demand for legal help and straining volunteer-run hotlines. And across California — including its most progressive regions — many immigrants still appear in court without a lawyer. The State Bar of California reports that even with recent investments, including an additional $25 million in the 2025 budget, available resources fall well short of rising need.

For Giselle, those systemic failures were etched into her daily life.

“Our biggest crime is being brown,” Giselle said. Beside her, her friend Jessica nodded in agreement. For both women, their immigration status compounds the risks they already face.

Jessica said the strain of daily life had become its own barometer of inequity. Because she and her family are all vulnerable to immigration enforcement, she often feels pressure to shoulder more — a calculation shaped, she said, by her lighter skin and the belief that she is less likely to be singled out in a system where racial profiling by ICE has been repeatedly reported. “I’m working two jobs right now because I have to provide for my family,” she said. “I’m light-skinned, and even though I don’t look Mexican, I am.”

The removal-defense unit is unlikely to mend every fracture in the system. But it signals a turning point: for the first time Los Angeles County has embedded immigration attorneys within its own public defender’s office to defend clients in immigration court, reshaping a system that once funneled people directly from local jails into deportation proceedings.

“This is a critical moment — immigrants are being arrested every day by federal agents who show up in masks, without warrants, and engaging in profiling based on race,” said Eagly.