County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer will be asking the board on Tuesday to expand who qualifies for a program that provides immigration legal defense to people in San Diego to include unaccompanied children.
The program currently offers free attorneys to people in immigration custody at Otay Mesa Detention Center or people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Alternatives to Detention program, which includes people with ankle monitors and other tracking devices. Lawson-Remer hopes the board will approve adding unaccompanied migrant children, detained or not detained, to that list.
“The notion to me that anybody could think it was acceptable in any way for a kid to be by themselves and try to represent themselves in court in a complicated federal deportation immigration proceeding, that seems really callous and immoral,” Lawson-Remer told me.
Lawson-Remer said that she’s introducing the county program because the federal government is cutting funding for legal services programs for unaccompanied children at the end of the fiscal year, which is the end of this month. She said that affects an estimated 300 children in San Diego County. And, because the program has unused funding from its rollout phase, she said it can take on the additional cases without costing the county any more than planned.
(The Trump administration tried to cut funding for legal services for unaccompanied children sooner, which Congress has appropriated every year since 2012, but a federal judge ordered the government to pay out the funding that had already been appropriated.)
Children classified as unaccompanied migrant children generally arrive at the border without their families — though children separated from their families at the border receive this same label. From the border, they typically go to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services, which places them in facilities around the country where case managers work to screen relatives or other loved ones in the United States before releasing the children to them.
These children have their own immigration proceedings, and, as is the case for most others in immigration court, the government is not required to provide them attorneys if they can’t afford their own. (The only people who have government-provided attorneys are people who have mental health or cognitive concerns that a judge determines mean they cannot represent themselves, based on a court settlement in Franco v. Holder. That case covers California, Arizona and Washington.)
People with attorneys to represent them are much more successful in their cases than those who go unrepresented, according to several studies.
“We’re a nation that believes that you’re innocent until proven guilty, and law and order means our rules apply equally to everyone regardless of the size of their bank account, but people who can afford private lawyers are succeeding at rate 13 times those without an attorney,” Lawson-Remer said at a press conference announcing her proposal. “That gap tells us something is broken.”
Nonprofit legal service providers, including Casa Cornelia Law Center, have represented children for free in immigration court in San Diego County for years. Casa Cornelia focuses on unaccompanied children detained in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in San Diego and also offers services to nondetained children in the county, according to its website.
I wanted to know how the new program would overlap with the work Casa Cornelia does, so I reached out to Pedro Anaya, Jr. a spokesperson for the organization.
Anaya said that the organization would not take an official position on Lawson-Remer’s plan, but it welcomed the community discussion that the proposal would generate.
“Casa Cornelia Law Center has been providing legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children since 2001,” Anaya said. “Legal advocacy is essential to protect these vulnerable children, ensure access to their rights, and support safe reunification with family or sponsors. Our commitment to these children remains unwavering, and we continue to call on the community to support this critical work.”
When I asked about how many children the organization is currently able to serve and whether that has changed under the Trump administration, he said that he wasn’t able to provide data on 2025 until an end-of-the-year audit. In 2024, Casa Cornelia helped 1,197 children and youth, he said.
Lawson-Remer said she would expect program staff to consult with organizations including Casa Cornelia in shaping the county’s program for children, just as they did when launching the program to represent detained adults several years ago.
The county program contracts with attorneys in the region per case, meaning that it can be easily scaled up or down depending on need as long as there is funding, Lawson-Remer explained. She said that because it took a little while for word of the program to spread, it has a cushion of funding from its first years of operation that can be used to add children’s cases without spending any money not already set aside for the program.
“We have the funding to do it for now,” Lawson-Remer said. “I think we might have a different conversation when we get to the budget next year, but for this year we do.”
The county has represented more than 3,000 people in their immigration cases since the program launched, Lawson-Remer said.
People hoping to get a lawyer through the program can call 619-446-2883, and those detained at Otay Mesa Detention Center can dial 1157# to make a toll-free call.
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In Other News
Coping with deportation: For The San Diego Union-Tribune, Alexandra Mendoza profiled several families dealing with the aftermath of a loved one’s deportation.
Conviction vacated: Shelby Bremer at NBC 7 is following the case of a former refugee from Vietnam who is fighting to stay in the United States. Bremer reported that a judge vacated an old conviction after Chuong Dong argued that he hadn’t been advised of how the plea deal would potentially affect his immigration status.
Otay Mesa East: Customs and Border Protection announced that Caltrans and SANDAG have agreed to build the new border crossing at Otay Mesa East through the federal government’s Donations Acceptance Program. CBP said that construction would cost about $535 million.
Charged for entering: For inewsource, Sofía Mejías-Pascoe reported that San Diego has seen an increase in federal prosecutions for crossing the border without permission — and a decrease in prosecutions of other kinds of crime.
A muted celebration: The Mexican Consulate in San Diego won’t be hosting an Independence Day event this year, Alexandra Mendoza reported for The San Diego Union-Tribune, due to fear in the community about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
Lawson-Remer. Out to subsidize taxpayer dollars to lawyers.
Neither the City nor the County has any right to spend taxpayer funds on federal immigration issues. Little wonder why the budgets are bloated and parking is $10 per hour.