SAN DIEGO, November 15, 2026 — San Diego County’s Immigrant Legal Defense Program is straining under a surge in federal enforcement, with clients spending nearly twice as long in detention and attorneys scrambling to track cases that move across state lines before representation can be secured. The county has more than doubled the program’s budget to $13.2 million in response, but lawyers on the ground say the pace of transfers and the length of custody are outstripping their capacity to defend clients.
The Numbers Behind the Strain
The median time clients spent in custody jumped from 86 days to 167 days in the last fiscal year, according to the county’s annual report. The active caseload grew to 1,568 cases, with 783 new clients added. New-client calls averaged 53 per month, more than double the 23 calls a month the program fielded previously. Since the program launched in 2022, more than 3,500 people have received representation. In just over half of the cases that reached a substantive outcome, individuals were able to remain in the country, winning protection from deportation, dismissals, or release from detention.
A System in Motion
Attorneys describe a detention system in constant motion. Clients arrested in other states are routinely transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center for adjudication, or moved out of San Diego before a local lawyer can intervene. Francesca Nevil, a staff attorney at the University of San Diego’s Immigration Clinic, said she is frequently assigned a case only to find her client transferred before she can file an entry of appearance. The churn disrupts the continuity of counsel and severs the attorney-client relationship at critical junctures.
Federal Priorities, Local Consequences
The pressure coincides with the Trump administration’s expanded deportation efforts. ICE, the federal agency created under the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 attacks, has seen its enforcement footprint grow. As of July, the agency held 65,765 people in detention centers nationwide, most without a criminal record, according to TracReports.org. County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer said the budget increase — from $5 million to $13.2 million approved in June — aims to ensure that people in San Diego County have access to an attorney and a fair opportunity to defend their rights, regardless of federal policy shifts.
Long-Term Residents Caught in the Net
Over the last year, attorneys reported a significant increase in ICE arrests of long-term community members — people with deep family, employment, and community ties. Lawyers have increasingly leveraged those ties, along with psychological evaluations, to argue that removal would cause exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to qualifying U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident relatives. The strategy has worked in hundreds of cases. But the volume is rising. During the past fiscal year, 30 percent of the 783 new-client cases reached a substantive outcome. Of those, the majority resulted in the client remaining in the country, yet the growing backlog and transfer pace mean many cases stall before a merits hearing ever occurs.
Sources
- Longer time in custody, more transfers: San Diego’s immigrant defense program grapples with ICE crackdown
- United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement
- ICE Officer Involved in Maine Shooting Expressed Hatred of Immigrants
- ICE immigration enforcement harms health outcomes, causes trauma
- Immigration Removals Fall During the Second Trump Administration
- CPJ calls for release of Afghan journalist from ICE custody
Photo: usicegov (Public domain)
