Photo: Marie D. De Jesús, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Photo: Annie Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Contributor

Harris County on Tuesday approved a taxpayer-funded legal services program for immigrants, including those in the country illegally who face deportation, at the request of County Judge Lina Hidalgo.

Commissioners Court voted along party lines, with the two Republican members opposed, to become the first county in Texas to enact such a program.

The Houston area was the largest in the country with no taxpayer support of deportation defense. In Texas, the cities of Dallas, Austin and San Antonio have similar programs.

“We’re very excited to propose a measure that’s going to inject a measure of fairness into our justice system,” Hidalgo said before the vote. “I’ve seen the impact of a federal immigration system that is so broken and convoluted that folks are desperate to have an answer to their case.”

The Republicans —Jack Cagle and Steve Radack —said the county should not wade into a federal immigration issue.

Hidalgo’s resolution directs the Community Services Department to “design, administer funds for, and oversee an immigrant legal services program for county residents, subject to final approval by Commissioners Court.”

Hidalgo’s office estimated the program would cost $500,000 the first year and would require an additional employee to administer it. She said the county would explore partnerships with nonprofits that could help defray some costs to taxpayers.

The county judge said public support of immigrant legal services in other places has been effective in reducing unnecessary detentions and deportations and allowing immigrants to remain in the country legally. Hidalgo said last year she visited a Texas immigrant detention center where men told her they were despondent because their cases had no end in sight. Houston immigration courts have some of the highest backlogs in the country, with nearly 52,000 cases pending.

Legal representation is crucial for defendants to receive due process, Hidalgo said, adding that children sometimes are forced to represent themselves in immigration cases. Unlike in the criminal justice system, immigrants facing deportation are not provided attorneys by the federal government if they cannot afford them.

Hidalgo said children suffer when their parents are unable to navigate the complicated immigration legal system.

“The children of detained and deported parents face enormous health and mental health challenges that can lead to poor performance in school and increased risk of poverty, placement in foster care, incarceration, and food and housing insecurity,” Hidalgo wrote.

Harris County is home to more than 400,000 immigrants who are in the country illegally and Hidalgo said they contribute to the economy and are a critical part of the labor force.

“Undocumented immigrant households in Houston earned $11 billion in total income in 2016, paying $742 million in federal taxes and $448 million in state and local taxes, resulting in $9.8 billion in remaining total spending power,” the resolution reads.

Hidalgo, herself an immigrant, was born in Colombia. She moved with her family to Houston in 2005.

About two dozen speakers urged Commissioners Court to support the proposal at Tuesday’s meeting.

Javier Hernandez, who came here illegally from Mexico as a child and received temporary protection through the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, said access to counsel can be a matter of life or death for immigrants who face violence in their countries of origin.

Rabbi David Segal, who does advocacy for the Reform denomination of Judaism in Texas, likened discrimination his Jewish ancestors faced to the current plight of immigrants here illegally.

“Families belong together, and everyone deserves due process,” Segal said.

Maria Espinoza, a Republican candidate for Congress in Texas’ 7th District and founder of The Remembrance Project, which advocates for victims of immigrant violence and has been termed anti-immigrant, was one of a handful of residents to speak in opposition to the fund. Espinoza worried about the cost immigrants here illegally place on local governments for health care, law enforcement and education.

“The Harris County taxpayer should not foot the bill and hold the bag for those who intentionally cross (the border) illegally,” she said.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national organization advocating for reduced immigration, also slammed the defense fund and others like it as a misallocation of scarce public resources.

Nearly 27,000 people face deportation in Houston immigration courts, said Andrea Guttin, legal director of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative.

She said the county also spends $1.6 million on detaining immigrants in local jails until Immigration and Customs Enforcement can take them into custody, more than any other county in the nation.

The federal agency last year issued more than 5,000 so-called detainers in Harris County , the most in the country, according to an analysis of federal data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Many cities across the nation have stopped cooperating with ICE in holding immigrants on such detainers, in part because of concerns over the constitutionality. Some courts have found detaining immigrants without a warrant if they are otherwise eligible for release is illegal. Texas law, however, requires local jurisdictions to comply with all immigration detainers.

Guttin, of the legal services collaborative, said about 250,000 children in Harris County have at least one parent at risk of deportation because they are here without legal status.

“Children who are separated from their deported parents may never reunite with them,” she said.

She noted that almost every big city in the state and country— including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago— have similar taxpayer funds for deportation defense.

“This is a due process issue,” Guttin said. “There has been a trend across the country and across Texas to put taxpayer dollars to this funding.”

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