By Richard Halstead
rhalstead@marinij.com
Marin officials have decided how they plan spend the $500,000 that county supervisors allocated in March to support immigrants.
The bulk of the money, $240,000, will be dedicated to providing legal services. Another $185,000 will pay for support services, mainly rental assistance, and $75,000 will go to the Marin Rapid Response Network, which operates a 24-hour hotline for people to report raids by federal immigration agents.
“We are, proudly, one of the few counties in the state that has explicitly budgeted dollars to support our immigrant community,” County Executive Derek Johnson said at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday. “It should be absolutely clear that this county has been leading with its values of equity and integrity.”
The county received 10 responses to a request for proposals to serve as the vendors providing the services. The Marin County Office of Education and Immigrant Legal Defense, a nonprofit in Oakland, were selected to provide the legal services. Community Action Marin, a nonprofit in Novato, was selected to provide the support services.
Lisa Miller, assistant superintendent at the county education office, said the $240,000 allocation will pay for the services of one full-time Immigrant Legal Defense lawyer for about a year. Miller said there has been no estimate yet regarding how many clients that might cover.
Miller said the attorney would regularly visit the campuses of San Rafael City Schools and the Novato Unified School District to provide immigration screenings for students and their families, and evaluate cases for representation. Immigrants would not have to be facing removal proceedings to receive representation.
According to the county education office, 34% of San Rafael students identify as Hispanic or Latino, while in Novato 25% of students identify similarly.
“Because of the high Latino/immigrant populations in both school districts, including the undocumented and mixed-status families, there is a critical need for immigration legal services in these communities,” the office said in its proposal.
Miller said the office has not identified any potential legal clients.
To be eligible for support services, immigrant families must live in Marin County, have a primary income earner detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and require financial aid for basic needs such as housing, food, utilities or transportation. A maximum of $5,000 will be provided per family.
Chandra Alexandre, the chief executive officer of Community Action Marin, said she wasn’t sure yet how many families might qualify. Alexandre said she expects most of the money to go toward rental assistance.
“The primary concern is keeping people housed when the primary breadwinner has been detained,” she said.
Community Action Marin has plenty of experience providing rental assistance. From November 2022 through early 2024, it administered the county’s federally-funded Emergency Rental Assistance program.
In its response to the request for proposals, Community Action Marin said it serves more than 6,000 people annually.
“We estimate that 60% are immigrants and 20% are undocumented, but do not explicitly collect this data from our community,” it said.
Both the legal and support services programs are still in their formative stages, and neither has begun serving clients.
Lisa Bennett, executive director of the Marin Rapid Response Network, has already put the $75,000 that her organization received to work, hiring two part-time coordinators to help her answer the organization’s hotline.
“Everyone else is a volunteer,” Bennett said.
The organization’s hotline rang off the hook on Thursday, the day an immigration crackdown by ICE was expected to begin in the Bay Area. On Wednesday, President Trump sent about 100 federal agents to Coast Guard Island in Alameda. Trump held back from deploying federal agents after consulting with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.
“We probably got over 100 calls,” Bennett said.
All of the calls proved to be false alarms. Bennett said many of them appeared to have been triggered by a two-day-old video of a Marin County Sheriff’s Office investigative team that was posted on the internet.
“There are so many rumors,” Bennett said. “We are doing our best to tamp them down and de-escalate the tensions. It’s a never-ending process. It’s as if we were being raided every day.”
No large-scale immigration raids have happened in Marin since Trump took office. Bennett said she was aware of about 11 Marin residents who have been detained since April. She said the four most recent detentions occurred when immigrants traveled to San Francisco to attend immigration hearings.
Originally published: October 25, 2025 at 4:37 PM PDT