Fresno Councilmember Miguel Arias is asking the city to set aside $1 million to help pay legal fees for residents detained by ICE who may have been swept up unlawfully, a proposal headed to the city council's Thursday meeting. The money would come from salary savings tied to unfilled city positions, and it would be run through the City Attorney's Office rather than handed directly to outside nonprofits.
Arias wants the funding formally redirected during Fresno's midyear budget review in January, according to GV Wire, which first reported the plan. The councilmember told the outlet the fund would help pay legal fees for Fresno residents who may be illegally detained, and he estimated that ICE has detained about 100 Fresno residents, though that figure has not been independently verified. As The Business Journal also reported, the proposal arrives as immigration enforcement activity has intensified across the city.
Where the Money Would Come From
Arias has been specific about the funding source: not new taxes or a budget cut elsewhere, but savings generated when city jobs sit vacant. “These funds would be from the general fund, from salary savings of positions that are not filled,” Arias said, per ABC30. The city council is set to consider the proposal during its meeting Thursday, the station reported, with any formal reallocation of funds expected to follow during the January midyear review.
This wouldn't be Fresno's first attempt at a legal-defense fund. The city previously allocated $200,000 for a similar effort back in 2021, according to the same ABC30 report — a fraction of the $1 million Arias is now proposing.
Mayor Calls the Plan Premature
Not everyone at City Hall is on board. Mayor Jerry Dyer said the proposal is premature because there's no way to know what the budget will look like until the midyear review actually arrives, and he pointed out that other local organizations already provide immigration legal-defense services, per ABC30's reporting. Arias, for his part, has argued the city can limit the fund to simple, clear violations to avoid prolonged legal battles that could exhaust the funding — a guardrail aimed at stretching $1 million across as many cases as possible.
That approach leans on data from Centro La Familia, a local organization that screens detained residents for potential legal relief. About 80% of the people the organization has screened don't have criminal records, GV Wire reported, citing program director Xavier Vazquez. Vazquez also said more than 90% of releases the organization has seen come from attorneys who can show arrests were made unlawfully — the kind of outcome Arias says his proposed fund is designed to support.
Enforcement Activity Has Climbed Sharply
The proposal lands amid a documented uptick in ICE activity across Fresno County. ICE agents have shown up to Fresno County farms, construction sites, and have been making traffic stops across the city, ABC30 reported. The Fresno Bee reported a surge of around two dozen ICE arrests conducted primarily via traffic stops in Fresno and Madera counties during the week through October 6.
That timeline tracks with reporting from the Los Angeles Times, which found that farmworkers began reporting immigration enforcement patrols on October 6, according to a United Farm Workers representative. Arias told the Times that the enforcement operations led to a drop in school attendance and sparked student protests, and he reported a substantial reduction in employees showing up to farm operations, packing sheds and in the fields, adding that construction has essentially come to a halt.
A separate CalMatters report found that advocates said at least 100 people had been detained in the San Joaquin Valley over three days, and a Fresno activist told the outlet that the number of vans transporting detained people to the downtown ICE office had risen from a couple per day to 10 to 15 vans per day. CalMatters noted that ICE declined to confirm the reported increase in enforcement activity in the San Joaquin Valley. Nationally, ICE averaged more than 1,580 arrests a day in July, a record for the Trump administration, and arrests in the San Francisco region spiked nearly 70%, from 2,928 during the first seven months of 2025 to 4,970 over the same period this year, per ICE records cited by CalMatters.
Fresno Would Join a Growing List of Cities
California has funded immigrant legal defense against deportation for a decade, and more cities and counties are now kicking in their own money, according to a separate CalMatters report on the broader trend. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously beefed up its defense fund with $3.5 million in October, while Alameda County doubled a fund it had started with $3.5 million. Santa Clara County initially allocated $5 million to support response activities related to immigration enforcement and has since increased that allocation to $13 million.
Los Angeles launched a $10 million public-private immigrant-defense fund in 2017 that was expanded in 2022 to create RepresentLA, and the state itself established a $45 million Immigrant Assistance Program, also known as One California, back in 2015 to support nonprofits serving immigrants. Smaller cities have moved too: Anaheim's City Council unanimously directed its city attorney's office to find a nonprofit partner for a fund ranging from $50,000 to $100,000, aiming to connect families of detained people with legal professionals within 24 to 48 hours of an arrest, according to LAist. Anaheim's existing Contigo program, which started with $250,000 in grant funding, had already benefited 343 residents, city documents showed.
If Fresno's council moves forward Thursday, the city would be weighing in at a scale closer to San Francisco and Alameda County than to Anaheim's more modest pilot — though Dyer's objection means the plan's fate, and any final budget figure, won't be settled until the January midyear review.
