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…