Legal Resources for Surviving and Combatting the Administration’s Attack on Immigrants

The new project launched by our team members, the Defending Equity Initiative, is now several weeks in and we have greatly appreciated the outreach from volunteers in response to our initial call for support. We will have more updates soon on that side in the coming weeks, and look forward to finding ways to take that great energy from our community of practitioners and find ways to help.

We did want to call out one addition to the website, which is a set of resources related to protecting immigrants, including sample guidelines to be prepared for an ICE raid, preparing to defend an I-9 audit, and ‘know your rights’ guides for immigrants. Huge thanks to our own team members, including our MLC Employment team who tackled the work from an employer perspective and with support from Watsonville Law Center, a great organization that is doing great work on the front lines of the crisis, There are lots of great organizations out there putting out similar information, and we try to link to a couple — if you know others, please reach out so we can expand the library of resources and links to connect our community with the organizations doing the most important work.

Compared to the horrors we are seeing daily here in Los Angeles, with community members living in fear of abduction by masked ICE agents, functioning more than ever like a secret police that will now receive $170 billion to expand their abominable operations, these sorts of resources admittedly feel small and futile. With time and persistence, hopefully it can help add up to something meaningful. Our hearts go out to everyone trying to survive these times.