About the California Legal Immigration Fellowship

Immigrant Legal Defense provides mentorship for new immigration attorneys in rural California as part of the California Immigration Legal Fellowship – a historic partnership with the state of California, which increasingly recognizes immigration legal access as a fundamental equity issue. To date, ILD has supported ten fellows at organizations in California’s Central Valley and the Central Coast – locations historically limited in their capacity to provide pro-bono direct representation and who have never before been able to represent clients in detention.

Clients of ILD & the Immigration Legal Fellowship recently wrote this letter of thanks to supporters of this program:

As a husband and wife with two children and deep ties to California, we are writing to share our story with you and to tell you how big of an impact the California Immigration Legal Fellowship has made on our family.

We met and fell in love in 2016. L is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, but her husband, H, had recently immigrated from El Salvador to the United States because gangs had threatened him back home. He was facing deportation, which terrified the both of us. The possibility of him being sent back to danger in El Salvador was even more terrifying once we had children.

We tried everything we could to get a lawyer to help H apply for protection here. In Bakersfield there aren’t many immigration attorneys, and we’d heard that we had to be really careful because attorneys might charge you a lot of money but not do a good job on your case. The idea that we’d hire the wrong person was scary to us, but in the end we couldn’t find any local attorneys who could take our case. We spoke to a few notarios, and one told us to go to Fresno or Los Angeles. We did everything we could to find help for H’s case in the Central Valley, but nothing panned out. We started to give up.

Then, when L was a student at California State Bakersfield, she started getting emails from the
school administration announcing a new program: students with immigration legal questions could sign up for a free consultation with Immigrant Legal Defense (ILD) because of a program paid for by the state of California. She signed up and told the attorney about our family’s situation. Soon, we were connected to an attorney, Irving, a California Legal Immigration Fellow from Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA who was supervised by an attorney, Laura Polstein, at ILD). Laura and Irving didn’t charge us any money, and we immediately felt comfortable with them and saw they would fight for our family. They helped us apply for every option available to protect H from being deported back to danger and to
keep our family together.

We are a family that values community and works to help others. L graduated from Cal State Bakersfield in 2021 with a degree in Psychology and now works for the local school district, helping connect bilingual families to early education opportunities. L’s brother joined the National Guard and is currently deployed in Poland, where he is helping Ukrainian refugees fleeing war. Once he secures legal status, H is eager to work in support of our community, too.

Our family needed an immigration attorney, someone to reach out their hand and help. We knocked on so many doors, and are so grateful that we finally found the California Immigration Legal Fellowship. Without this program, we don’t know where we’d be. We spent years walking around in fear that we’d be separated, that H would be killed back home. We have deep roots in California and want to stay here, safely and together. None of this would be possible without the California Immigration Legal Fellowship, and we are so grateful to you for your continued support of this program, making sure families like ours receive this same support throughout California.

Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.