California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation - Citizenship and Immigration Project https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/proposals-2021/california-rural-legal-assistance-foundation-citizenship-and-immigration-project https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/@@site-logo/sitelogo-75x75.png

California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation - Citizenship and Immigration Project

Additional Information
Used for	If awarded, funds would support our Citizenship and Immigration Project, which educates and empowers immigrants and their allies in protecting and exercising their rights under the law. This work also empowers the community by giving them the tools to advocate for themselves, such as pro se (self help) assistance for undocumented residents and technical training and resources for our partner organizations. An investment in this project would be far reaching, as we work closely with other nonprofits, religious organizations, law schools, colleges and universities, businesses, local pro bono attorneys, educators, and other community partners dedicated to protecting immigrant, migrant, and refugee families and workers—ensuring healthy and just communities for all.
Benefits	Our Citizenship and Immigration Project’s initiatives are driven by our commitment to furthering access to justice for those who cannot afford legal representation. The benefits of our immigrant-centered approach include furthering unity across racial and ethnic communities, and building solidarity and collaboration with local, state, and national partners. We focus on some of our most marginalized communities and seek to bring about social justice to rural poor communities by working to address the most pressing needs of our community: Labor, Housing, Education Equity, Health Care Access, Worker Safety, Citizenship, Immigration, and Environmental Justice.
Proposal Description	California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation (CRLAF) is a statewide non-profit civil legal aid organization that was established in 1981 to meet a profound unmet need for access to justice for hardworking families and individuals who have legal rights but limited access to free legal services. Our mission is to achieve social justice and equity in partnership with farmworkers and all low-wage workers and their families in rural communities through community, legislative, and legal advocacy. We focus on some of the most marginalized communities: the unrepresented, the unorganized, and the undocumented. Our current activities include community education and outreach, free direct legal services, impact litigation, legislative and administrative advocacy, and public policy leadership at the state and local level. Our objective is to bring about social justice to rural poor communities by working to address the most pressing needs of our community: Labor, Housing, Education Equity, Health Care Access, Worker Safety, Citizenship, Immigration, and Environmental Justice. The vast majority of CRLAF's target client population live in rural communities throughout Northern California, the San Joaquin Valley, and the Central Valley. The individuals we serve in this population are farmworkers, students, hospitality workers, or other low-wage workers. Most of our clients are very low-income, hard-to-reach, and underserved, and a very large percentage are undocumented. In many rural communities throughout the region, families live so far from even the smallest towns that they rarely have access to immigration legal or education services. Many families cannot even find an attorney, let alone afford to hire one. With such a severe lack of services and information, this population is very vulnerable to immigration consultant fraud. Our Citizenship and Immigration Project’s objectives and associated activities, all of which are ongoing in response to the community need, include: Community Education & Health Advocacy With a goal of ensuring communities to have access to free, credible, and up-to-date information about immigration law and policy, CRLAF regularly hosts immigration information sessions at labor camps, churches, town halls, the Mexican Consulate, resource centers, schools and colleges, housing communities, and medical clinics throughout the Central Valley. Attendance at these events range from 10-500 community members. Recent presentations covered the 2020 Census and the importance of participating regardless of one’s immigration status, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and other topics of high interest to immigrants. When COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders and other public health directives made these types of large in-person gatherings impossible, we shifted the format of our presentations to online events or televised interviews on Spanish language news media. The pandemic caused immigrant communities to confront various difficulties in regards to access to health care and testing, eligibility for public benefits, limited disaster relief options, and workers’ rights. Our messaging educated immigrants and their allies on how the pandemic affected immigrant access to health care and social services, and what legal rights immigrant communities have to access these services—regardless of their immigration status. Unfortunately, COVID-19 and barriers to accessing health care and public benefits will continue to affect California’s immigrant communities, and we will continue our education, outreach, direct services, and policy advocacy work related to health care and public benefits access for immigrant communities as long as they are needed. Legal Empowerment & Representation Furthering our objective of empowering and representing immigrants eligible for relief under the law, CRLAF has provided free immigration consultations to community members throughout California for over thirty years. These consultations take place in a wide variety of locations including community centers following community presentation, on roads adjacent to agricultural fields, in our offices, during final review at a DACA or Naturalization workshop, or at community colleges and universities. CRLAF also regularly provides consultation services for individuals in removal proceedings who are both non-detained and detained. Our advocates visit the only detention center in Northern Californian on a regular basis to provide free consultations to detainees without legal representation. In addition to providing consultations and advice through these visits, CRLAF also uses these visits to identify potential detained cases for representation. CRLAF attorneys are also able to provide limited scope consultation and coaching to individuals in removal proceedings, amplifying our capacity to assist as many community members as possible. Our attorneys also provide training to community advocates on immigration and naturalization law, as well as direct assistance to immigrants seeking naturalization, Asylum, U Visa (for victims of violent crime, most of whom are female), T visas (for human trafficking victims), U Visas (for undocumented victims of domestic abuse at the hands of their U.S. citizen spouse), DACA, family based immigration relief, and relief for unaccompanied minors. Women’s Rights Because of the great need for legal services specific to the needs of female undocumented victims of crime, CRLAF provides immigration consultations in safe spaces for low-income, immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other violent crimes. Fear of deportation, coupled with fear of their abuser(s), is a significant barrier to undocumented female victims of crime seeking help. Many of these women, most of whom have several children, have experienced horrific trauma as a result of their experiences as victims and CRLAF is representing these families in their immigration matters. There is a particular need for these services in rural, agricultural areas such as California’s Central Valley, where four out of five farmworker women have experienced sexual harassment or abuse. These incidents go largely unreported due to fear of being fired or deported and because of the inaccessibility of legal assistance (Human Rights Watch). Across the U.S., over half a million women work in the fields and most are undocumented. They often work alone and need rides from supervisors to and from work, leaving them isolated and vulnerable. To combat the epidemic of sexual abuse among undocumented female farmworkers, CRLAF has specific programs and strategies, many in partnership with other community-based organizations, designed for the needs of this vulnerable population. CRLAF’s capacity to serve our communities comes from our organization’s deep roots in, and longstanding institutional ties to, the largely rural, Latinx and low-income communities where we work. Many of our staff members are former farm workers or from farm worker families. This connection makes CRLAF well positioned to grasp the issues of concern to rural poor communities, and to design culturally sensitive solutions. It is our hope that The Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation will join us as partners in this work, and we thank you in advance for your thoughtful consideration of our request.