FRESNO - [Erasto Vasquez] Vasquez was surprised to see a forklift appear one morning outside his trailer near the corner of East and Springfield, two small rural roads deep in the grapevines, ten miles southwest of Fresno. He and his neighbors pleaded with the driver, but to no avail. The machine uprooted the fence Vasquez had built around his home and left it smashed in the dirt. Then, the forklift's metal tines lifted the side of one trailer high into the air. It groaned and tipped over, with a family's possessions still inside. "We were scared," Vasquez remembers. "I felt it shouldn't be happening, that it showed a complete lack of respect. But who was there to speak for us?"

Providing legal services to communities of indigenous farmworkers in California is complicated by the large number of people who lack legal immigration status, and by restrictions on some $7.2 million it receives from the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, DC. "Immigration status has always been a criteria for eligibility," says Jose Padilla, CRLA's executive director, "but until 1996 the law didn't restrict the use of other funds for that purpose. In '96, however, Congress said that so long as we receive even $1 in Federal funding, we can't represent undocumented people. The same legislation also prohibited us from collecting attorney fees, and filing class actions."

In 2006 the LSC issued a report, requested by Devin Nunes (R-Visalia), finding "substantial evidence that CRLA has violated federal law" by engaging in conduct prohibited by funding restrictions. A year later, Kirt West, outgoing LSC inspector general, issued a subpoena demanding 33 months of data on 39,000 clients to determine if CRLA "disproportionately focuses its resources on farm worker and Latino work." CRLA refused to comply with the subpoena, Padilla says, "because California law protects clients and their confidentiality." The case has been fully briefed and awaits either the scheduling of a hearing or a decision.

Children & youth
Families & family life