To the editor:
The People’s Budget Coalition commends the action of the City Council in deciding to reject the initial draft of the city’s FY27 budget to ensure there is time to adjust the plan to include critical funding for deportation defense.
The small amount of funding the coalition has advocated for would bolster local legal services capacity for defending Lynn residents and families being targeted and persecuted by the extremist, discriminatory, and cruel immigration enforcement policies of the Trump administration.
The coalition is made up of a broad collective of grassroots and community groups in Lynn, including Neighbor to Neighbor, the Lynn LUCE Hub and the Comité Nueva Primavera, Lynn United for Change, MA Senior Action Council, SEIU Local 509, New Lynn Coalition, and the Essex County Community Organization, among others. We greatly look forward to working with both the City Council and Mayor Nicholson over the coming weeks to amend the budget and dedicate enough funding to significantly address the gap in capacity for immigration legal services at the local level to protect Lynn families.
We recognize that this is an unusual task for the city to take on, but these are unusual and unprecedented times in which we are up against forces of authoritarianism. Unprecedented action is needed to protect our community and our city.
Our school enrollment is down 20%, resulting in millions of dollars of funding losses from the state. Our small businesses are struggling. Families with small children are having to decide between paying rent and paying legal fees in desperate attempts to win the release of loved ones facing unjust deportation and often illegal detention.
A small investment now will help guard against even larger human and financial losses in the near future.
Furthermore, we would like to highlight that the city budget totals at over $577 million dollars.
Our original set of proposals, including a broader range of community priorities – from expanding youth employment and civic leadership opportunities, to investing in family-friendly warming and cooling centers for vulnerable residents, to expanding the capacity of the city’s CALM unarmed crisis response team – totaled at $1.6 million dollars. That is less than 0.3% of the total budget.
Mayor Nicholson and the council are doing meaningful work around a number of these issues. Following extensive conversations with the Mayor, which the coalition has greatly appreciated, we narrowed our proposal down to the most urgent category of immigration legal services in partnership with a local organization.
We feel strongly that there must be at least enough money in the budget to fund a single full-time attorney dedicated to Lynn residents who are falling through existing capacity gaps; we envision this attorney working with the Lynn LUCE mutual aid network as a direct connection to families and individuals impacted by the ongoing attack on immigrant members of our community.
We know this is possible without pulling from any essential public services or civil service positions. And we know that, with the council, the Mayor, and the community working together, we can rise to the moment and meet this critical need for Lynn residents.
The Lynn People’s Budget Coalition
