Supervisor Laura Capps lobbed a last-second Hail Mary of a budget request, nudging the rest of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors to allocate $240,000 from the county’s cannabis revenues to help fund mental health services through the Immigrant Legal Defense Center, which has been overwhelmed with the impact of the recent wave of immigration enforcement on the Central Coast.
“Regardless of how one feels about the policies coming from the federal government, we can all agree that we have a crisis on our hands, with people — a lot of young people — whose parents are disappearing overnight,” Supervisor Capps said while laying out her request during Tuesday’s budget deliberations.
Capps shared the story of a “bright, high-achieving” 15-year-old girl in Carpinteria whose life was thrown into chaos when her father was arrested by ICE while on his way to work. The girl’s mother had been killed in a car accident when she was a toddler, and after her father was detained, she was left in the care of her elderly grandmother who couldn’t afford to keep them housed. They both now live out of their car, and the girl’s anxiety is so bad she could barely focus on her final weeks of school.
Another child, a 5-year-old boy from Santa Maria who had already survived traumatic armed robbery, has been “spiraling into anxiety and fear” out of worry that his mother might be deported. The mother is attempting to navigate the asylum process, Capps said, but the family is concerned that she could be detained at an upcoming court date, forcing the family to prepare for the very real possibility of being separated.
“She has made the heartbreaking decision to leave him in the U.S. with extended family if deported, choosing his safety over being with him,” Capps said. “So what happens to that child?”
Clinical psychologist Carolynn Gray, founder of Gradient Psychology, said that California clinicians are being flooded with requests for mental health services due to the impacts of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
“These are not isolated incidents,” said Immigrant Legal Defense Center Executive Director Julissa Peña. “They’re a pattern that deeply impacts our community’s well-being. Legal protection and mental healthcare must go hand in hand to ensure our families don’t just survive, but begin to heal.”
The Immigrant Legal Defense Center currently has a waitlist of more than 65 individuals, including children, in need of mental health support. Supervisor Capps originally suggested the county use as much as $360,000 from cannabis revenues to cover the costs of three therapists to meet the immediate demand.
Capps recommended the Immigrant Legal Defense Center as the primary resource due to the trust that Peña and her staff have already built with the undocumented community with both legal representation and counseling support. This ingrained trust with the community is “fundamental” in the face of all the fear and anxiety, Capps said.
After a bit of discussion, the board unanimously agreed to the request to allocate a total of $240,000 to fund two therapists for the Immigrants Legal Defense Center, with the intention of coming back in six months to see how the program has been working. The funds will come through adjustments to Sheriff’s Office overtime along with $102,500 from the cannabis release balance reserves. Funding will be allocated to the organization immediately.
“This strategic allocation aims to address the unique psychological stress, anxiety, and trauma associated with exposure to a climate of increasingly intense deportation measures,” Supervisor Capps said.
