Among the bookshelves at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, Ramón Hernández sits in a cubicle a few days a week, holding hour after hour of consultations with immigrants who have questions about their legal status.
Demand for the public library’s free immigration services has shot up since the return of President Trump, who has attacked immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” promised the largest mass deportations in U.S. history and suggested selling $5 million “gold cards” granting rich people permanent residency and a path to citizenship.
Anyone can meet with an immigration expert by phone, or in person at half a dozen Los Angeles Public Library locations from Wilmington to Pacoima, through a long-running, city-funded program called the New Americans Initiative.
“We’ve been seeing more folks who are wanting to either get their citizenship finally done or adjust their status to become legal permanent residents — and a lot of them are because of the new administration,” said Hernández, who works for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a nonprofit advocacy organization and one of several service providers the city contracts with under the program.
Hernández and his colleagues help people become legal permanent residents, apply for citizenship and renew green cards or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals permits. They can help people prepare for the citizenship exam or file records requests for their immigration histories, among other services.
The libraries also offer general consultations to address questions or concerns people have about their immigration status under the Trump administration.
“Everyone right now is looking to have a plan, get their questions answered by talking to a trustworthy immigration services provider, and they need to know their rights,” Madeleine Ildefonso, managing librarian for the L.A. Public Library’s Office of Civics and Community Services.
Ildefonso, a 20-year veteran of the library system who in 2018 helped launch the New Americans Initiative, said the program has seen an increase in calls since the start of the year. The library also has received a jump in requests for “know your rights” cards. The size of a credit card, the red cards, available in a variety of languages, advise citizens and noncitizens of their constitutional rights and can be handed to immigration agents to invoke 4th and 5th Amendment protections.
She said the library is printing the cards in 18 languages, with plans to expand to 31 languages. The library also is planning more citizenship classes and workshops for families to prepare key documents and decide who will care for children in case a parent or relative is detained.
About 1.4 million Angelenos, or 36% of the city’s population, are foreign-born, and an additional 29% have at least one immigrant parent, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The L.A. metro area has the second-largest number of immigrants in the nation after New York City. Immigrants make up about 15% of the population nationwide, according to the think tank.
This month, L.A. City Council members proposed new measures to ramp up the city’s resistance to Trump’s immigration policies, including more funding for immigration legal services groups and a comprehensive “know your rights” campaign.
If successful, some of those proposals would mean expanding on the kind of support the L.A. Public Library has been offering for years. The New Americans Initiative was launched under former Mayor Eric Garcetti during the first Trump administration and built on a previous Path to Citizenship program that offered classes to people eligible to naturalize. Some bigger library systems, including New York City, offer similar programs.
The program, which is entirely city-funded, has a budget of $1.2 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year and is one of the main ways the city offers assistance to immigrants. Although some of the money supports classes and workshops on naturalization, citizenship and English as a second language, most of it goes toward one-on-one sessions with immigration experts such as Hernández.
Assistance is available to anyone at the participating library branches, regardless of their immigration status or where they live.
In December, Mayor Karen Bass signed a sanctuary city law that prohibits city employees and resources from being involved in federal immigration enforcement, enshrining a policy first established by executive order several years ago under Garcetti. President Trump has since threatened to punish “sanctuary cities” by cutting off federal funds, including disaster relief money L.A. needs to recover from the recent wildfires.
Many appointments are initiated through a phone message line. The multilingual library staffers who return these calls can get hundreds of them each month. Appointments also can be scheduled online. The one-on-ones are offered in English, Spanish, Armenian, Korean, Farsi, Russian and Tagalog. Program administrators hope to add Mandarin Chinese and Thai.
All 72 of the Los Angeles public libraries also have “welcome stations” with materials to help legal permanent residents with the naturalization process. That includes “citizenship envelopes” with a checklist of all the documents and steps needed to become naturalized citizens, as well as other resources, such as flash cards to help with vocabulary and civics knowledge for the citizenship test.
More than 500,000 people in L.A. County were legal permanent residents eligible to naturalize as of May 2024, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
One of the biggest barriers to citizenship is the oral civics exam with 100 possible questions. The naturalization application is an obstacle in itself and can take several visits to the library over a few months to complete.
Promoting civic literacy and self-empowerment is in keeping with the long history of public libraries in the U.S. offering education and other resources to immigrants. The tradition goes back to the Gilded Age and steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant whose philanthropic support for public libraries was designed to educate citizens and immigrants alike.
Ildefonso said that anyone with concerns about confidentiality should be reassured by public libraries’ long tradition of protecting people’s privacy.
“Library staff is trained and knows how to handle questions that come into our library from law enforcement,” she said. “Community members should feel safe in a library setting. We’re just known as safe spaces for a lot of people.”
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