The office of the public defender San Francisco has opened a new division that will focus on protecting illegal immigrants from possible deportation. This Agency will be provided from the municipal budget, and the mayor of San Francisco ed Lee has already guaranteed an allocation of 200 thousand US dollars to protect illegal migrants.
It is planned that the office of the public defender will serve about 150 people a year. This figure is taken from statistics: of the 1,500 detainees in the city of illegal migrants, about 10% are awaiting deportation by the court.
Note that illegal immigrants are already receiving legal assistance from public organizations, but the municipal office of the public defender will focus their efforts directly on those who are already in custody. And it is important to note an interesting thing: as the deportation procedure applies to administrative law, workers have no automatic right to free counsel, which is provided for in criminal law.
«Mass deportation is in conflict with our core values. And for this reason we are not going to sit by and silently watch for tough measures against migrants,» said Jeff Adachi, the public defender.
According to various estimates, only San Francisco is home to about 44 thousand illegal migrants, of which about 11 thousand are from Mexico, 10 from China thousand and 2 thousand from the Philippines.
