Organization: California Rural Legal Assistance
Mission: California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, ("CRLAF"), works for social justice and equity for farmworkers and the underserved in rural California. The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges for essential workers, specifically, the 600,000+ farmworkers employed in California's $50 billion agricultural industry. In 2020, we strengthened laws and policies protecting workers' rights and health; worked to reduce agricultural work hazards and pesticide exposures faced by farmworkers and rural residents; helped keep immigrant families together; improved access to higher education; and helped Californians living in rural communities secure clean and reliable drinking water and build healthy communities.
Activities: Citizenship and Immigration Project:The past year has required our team to be exceedingly nimble given the unique and serious needs that arose within the communities we serve due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team worked to tackle each challenge and be a source of reliable information and assistance during this unprecedented time. The Immigration Unit's collective work is organized across four different project areas: Citizenship and Immigration, Removal Defense, San Joaquin Immigrant Empowerment, and the Sacramento FUEL Network. This report reviews each project area's accomplishments and programs over the past year and discusses our vision for the year to come.Citizenship and Immigration Project COVID-19 Response:As soon as California and its local governments began issuing shelter-in-place orders, our team developed and published a comprehensive guide to help undocumented and immigrant community members navigate the public health crisis. We updated this guide on a daily basis, made it available on the CRLAF website in both English and Spanish, and circulated it widely among our partners and networks throughout the Central Valley.CRLAF was 1 of 12 organizations selected by the state of California to administer a $75 million relief fund, the Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants (DRAI), to undocumented immigrants who were ineligible to receive the federal government's CARES Act relief. In the span of only 2 months, over 100 staff members, temporary hires, and volunteers processed over 9,500 DRAI applications and distributed over $4.5 million of $500 payments to 9,173 individuals in 8 Central Valley counties.We also developed other partnerships and established our own Farm Worker Relief Fund to distribute additional, much-needed relief funds to 485 families including individuals who did not receive either CARES Act or DRAI relief.Removal Defense:Our removal defense work includes direct representation in detained and non-detained court cases as well as the coordination of the Sacramento Attorney of the Day Program (AOD) at the Sacramento Immigration Court. The AOD program is only the second such program in the nation, providing a vital consultation and advice service for individuals without prior representation.At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our removal defense casework abruptly shifted focus toward more detained work. Our team took on the representation of 19 detainees, securing release and/or relief for 7 of them. Several of our detained clients that were released are still working with our attorneys toward relief in immigration court. Representation for each of these individuals was accomplished remotely through 30 minute-at-a-time telephone calls often with poor reception. Court hearings were also conducted via phone.San Joaquin Immigrant Empowerment Project:The San Joaquin Immigrant Empowerment Project's work centers around the complex intersection of health rights, public health, immigrants' rights, and immigration law. During this fiscal year, we focused especially on providing immigration legal services, advocacy, education and outreach, and legal training. We also provided technical assistance to other community partners addressing two major challenges facing immigrant communities: the administration's new public charge rule and the COVID-19 pandemic. This health and economic crisis has 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.COVID-19 Response:To remedy the chilling effect on public benefits enrollment created by the new public charge, CRLAF focused on community education, outreach and direct services. We spent the second half of this fiscal year ensuring that our public charge messaging was consistent with parallel messaging about how the pandemic has affected immigrant access to health care and social services, and what services immigrant communities legally have to access, regardless of immigration status.Additionally, we provided regular immigration legal services to students, families and staff at Delta College and survivors of crime at a women's center. Most of CRLAF's immigration cases in this region are humanitarian cases, such as U visa, T visa, or Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) applications. Currently, from San Joaquin to near Fresno county, CRLAF is one of the only organizations taking these types of cases at no cost to the client. Most of the individuals we serve do not have the means to hire a private attorney. There is a huge unmet need for attorneys to take on humanitarian aid cases pro bono in these regions. We plan to continue building community capacity to support such work moving forward.Sacramento FUEL Network Partners and Services:CRLAF continued to lead the Sacramento Family Unity Education and Legal Network (FUEL Network) and continues to serve as the primary legal training and technical assistance provider for the FUEL Network, and offered over 20 "Know Your Rights Train the Trainer" presentations, Family Emergency Preparedness Assistance trainings, UndocuAlly trainings, public charge trainings, and DACA trainings to funded and unfunded Network partners.CRLAF distributed subgrants to FUEL Network partner organizations so they could expand the services they provide the immigrant community. These subgrants were awarded through a competitive grant application process in which a committee composed of representatives from FUEL partner organizations, the City, and other local leaders made decisions about how to allocate approximately $70,000 in subgrant funds. The following organizations were selected to receive a subgrant in Year 3 of the FUEL Network: NorCal Resist, La Familia Counseling Center, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services, Placer People of Faith Together, Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, and Sacramento ACT. These organizations were funded to provide "Know Your Rights" presentations, family emergency preparedness assistance planning, affirmative limited scope and full scope legal services, representation at bond hearings, individual and group therapy, psychiatric evaluations, tabling and outreach, and rapid response hotline coordination.COVID-19 Response:When the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shelter-in-place orders began, CRLAF played a pivotal role in helping the City of Sacramento and FUEL Network partners support immigrants during the public health crisis. CRLAF developed and circulated to the FUEL Network partners vital information about resources and protections for immigrants, and used this robust coalition to disseminate information throughout the region. We also developed sample community education materials and presentations for our partners to use in their outreach activities.
Legal Support Services: As a California Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts(IOLTA)- funded Support Center, CRLAF provides free training, technical assistance and advocacy support to California legal services programs. Our primary focus is on rural poor issues with substantive expertise in the areas of labor and employment law, civil rights protections, family-based immigration, VAWA, U visas, T visas, naturalization, education, agricultural workers' health, rural housing preservation and development, housing protections for low-income immigrant and mixed status families, pesticides and worker safety. The project also carries out policy-oriented research and farmworker field surveys, conducts legislative and administrative advocacy in the wage & hour, unemployment insurance, and farm worker law areas, both at the state and federal level.We work to expand state labor laws affecting the rights of farm workers and other low-wage workers; to improve and reform state labor law enforcement efforts, particularly in the underground economy; to take a leadership role in opposing legislative or regulatory efforts to weaken new or existing labor rights that impact low-wage workers, and especially farm workers and their families; to undertake related legal and public policy research, education and media efforts; to train advocates, attorneys and agency staff about CRLAF-sponsored labor laws; to monitor guest worker admissions into California under the federal H-2A program; to participate in national advocacy efforts around guest worker programs and farm worker legalization. Our specific projects described below were Labor and Employment Policy program accomplishments.Labor and Employment Policy:The Labor and Employment project carries out policy-oriented research and farm worker field surveys, conducts legislative and administrative advocacy in the wage & hour, unemployment insurance, and farm worker law areas, both at the state and federal levels, and provides training, technical assistance and advocacy support to California legal services programs. CRLAF supported a number of critical measures that advanced worker protections in several areas, including: SB1383 which extends unpaid family leave protections to workers employed by employers of 5 or more; AB 2043, which provides for dissemination of information on best practices for COVID-19 infection prevention by CAL/OSHA to employees and employers; AB 3053, which creates an online portal for filing of wage claims; AB 3075, which requires disclosure of whether any officer or director of a limited liability corporation has outstanding judgments for unpaid wages; and SB 1257, which extends CAL/OSHA protections to household domestic workers.Our major affirmative legislative effort was sponsorship of SB 1102 (Monning), which was not signed by the Governor. The bill would have ensured that all H-2A farm workers admitted into the state of California are informed about fundamental labor, housing, health and safety and other California laws that protect them. All H-2A employers would have been mandated by SB 1102 to disclose these protections in writing, in Spanish, on the workers' first day of work. No other state has enacted such a law to date.Pesticide and Worker Safety:Key achievements for 2020 include enactment of a regulation for lighting of night-time agricultural work, bringing forward the practice of granting permits for harvest work within fire evacuation zones in Sonoma county, and improving language access at County Agricultural Commissioners' offices.Protection from COVID-19 in agricultural and food processing workplaces:CRLAF has been working with community-based organizations and other advocacy organizations to increase COVID-19 protections for farm workers. Through technical review of newly issued guidelines and research, advocating for increased enforcement, occupation-specific case reporting and development of a COVID-19 specific regulation that includes fieldworkers and packing house workers.On September 17, 2020, the Cal-OSHA Standards Board unanimously approved a petition for development of an emergency regulation for protecting workers from COVID-19 hazards. CRLAF is continuing to provide input on the rapid development of an emergency standard.Protection of Agricultural and other outdoor Workers from Wildfire Smoke:As wildfires increased in size and frequency, a growing number of farmworkers and other outdoor workers were made to continue working in very smoky conditions without any respiratory protection or training. After petitioning the OSHA Standards Board, an emergency regulation was developed and approved in July 2019. The new regulation requires training of outdoor workers in health effects of smoke exposure, rescheduling or relocating work sites to less smoky conditions when possible, and provision of N95 respirators when the air is unhealthy because of wildfire smoke.
Sustainable Rural Communities (SRCP): The Sustainable Rural Communities Project works to ensure equal access to health care for California's farm worker and rural indigent population through a three-part strategy of health status data development, analysis and dissemination; public policy analysis and discussion; and community outreach, education and capacity building.This project addresses the systemic causes of our communities' poverty, poor health and degraded environment. We coordinate with other advocates on a local, regional, and statewide strategy to craft large-scale solutions around healthcare for all, environmental justice issues (land use, unmet transit needs, water quality), foster more accountable and inclusive governance, and direct financial resources that address the priorities of the SRCP to rural and disadvantaged communities. Our specific projects described below were Dreamers-In-Action accomplishments that occurred during the Fiscal period.Dreamers-in-Action: Building Community Capacity:This past year, SRCP hosted two Health, Immigration & Census Fellows. The fellows effectively promoted access to immigration relief and information about immigration laws to the rural poor while engaging in outreach and education related, but not limited to: Medi-Cal, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), local safety-net programs, and the 2020 Census. The fellows also advanced CRLAF's regional efforts and collaborated with our Citizenship + Immigration Department on: (a) increasing the number of qualified legal permanent residents who apply for U.S. citizenship, (b) providing resources to help them with the naturalization process, and (c) encouraging them to become more fully civically engaged.Safe Drinking Water:Since 2015, our team has administered an Interim Emergency Bottled Water program to the two unincorporated farmworker communities in western Fresno County with over 700 residents. We continue to advocate with the residents of Cantua Creek and El Porvenir for a permanent solution to the communities' need for clean, safe drinking water. We also work with California's Water Resources Control Board to ensure both communities continue to receive uninterrupted bottled water delivery until a permanent solution is reached.Farmworker Health Study Funded:CRLAF recently led a budget request to update a 20-year old study of farmworker health data. We gained final approval in the state budget for a 3-year study in the amount of $1.5 million. This data will be used to inform policy and demonstrate the severe inequities rural immigrants face, strengthening our argument for stronger health and safety protections for all client communities.Health-4-Kern:In the past year, CRLAF provided critical support and resources to the collaborative Health-4-Kern's activities to expand health services to all; we are also providing technical assistance on key immigration issues, such as the proposed federal changes in the definition of public charge, and COVID-19 relief initiatives.A fact sheet on the remaining uninsured in Kern County was developed and distributed to Health4Kern partners with estimates of immigrant and undocumented uninsured, coverage and services currently available, and options for expanding care and coverage at clinics and Kern Medical Center. The fact sheet was developed to accurately represent community needs, data and viable solutions and resources. Strategies for expanding coverage for undocumented farmworkers were also developed, but without reliable data, it was hard to estimate specific needs and costs in Kern County.Health-4-Kern partners then developed an action plan for expanding care and coverage for the uninsured in early 2019. Health4Kern also worked alongside regional and statewide efforts to expand Medi-Cal eligibility to undocumented young adults aged 19-26. In January 2020, this legislation passed. That month the Governor's budget also included expanding Medi-Cal eligibility to undocumented seniors ages 65 and over. However, the Governor's May revision dropped the planned expansion for seniors due to the COVID-19 emergency.
NTEE category: Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
Secondary category: Human Services