Good Evening. This is our final News Brief of 2025, but don’t forget to join our Town Hall this Friday at Noon >
Thanks for your readership, and support. We’ll be back in 2026 with more stories of changemaking lawyers ❤️
People in deportation proceedings have a new ally: LA Public Defender's Office
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ChangeLawyers ED Chris Punongbayan spoke to the LA Public Press about the importance of this new pilot program.
“As the new removal-defense team takes shape, its arrival also exposes the uneven terrain of public defense across California. The state’s 58 counties operate independently, with varying levels of funding, political will and willingness to address immigration consequences. “There are counties that are very anti-immigrant, and they’re not going to fight for this,” said Christopher Punongbayan, the executive director of California ChangeLawyers, a statewide foundation that funds early-career lawyers and advocates, with a focus on expanding access to justice for marginalized communities. “We look at where the need is.”
Bay Area Lawyers aren't letting ICE off the hook
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Our longtime grant partner, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, is in the news again for going up against ICE. The organization is suing to stop ICE agents from detaining people coming and going to routine court hearings.
“We brought this case because people all across the country are being put to this impossible catch-22 where they either show up to immigration court and risk being escorted out in handcuffs or out of fear of that scenario they stay home and abandon their American dream,” said Jordan Wells with the Lawyer’s Committee.
The future of trans rights, featuring lawyer and activist Chase Stratton
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Chase Strangio is is Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. In On December 2024, he became the first openly trans person to argue before the Supreme Court, in U.S. v. Skrmetti.
