In 2006, mobile catering vendors in Los Angeles — known colloquially as lunch truck vendors orloncheros— found themselves subject to a municipal ordinance that severely limited the amount of time that they could sell food in public streets. Under the new local law, catering trucks were required to move every thirty minutes (if parked in a residential zone) or sixty minutes (if parked in a commercial zone) to a location at least one-half mile away. Vendors who did not comply were subject to steep fines.

This Essay examines the work of the UCLA criminal defense clinic on behalf of a grassroots group of lunch truck operators that formed to contest, and ultimately invalidate, the Los Angeles ordinance. Specifically, this Essay assesses the clinic’s effort to link an individual client’s defense to a broader community-based campaign to organize immigrant workers around legal reform. Toward this end, Part I offers a descriptive account of theloncheros’ political mobilization to challenge the Los Angeles durational restriction and of the clinic’s legal work on behalf of an individual vendor to advance that goal. Part II draws on theloncherocase study to examine three underappreciated aspects of criminal defense practice and, by extension, criminal clinics: law reform, problem solving across the civil-criminal line, and community mobilization. In sum, this Essay contributes the story of theloncherosas a case study in clinical process, while also using it to explore alternative conceptions of the criminal defense attorney’s role.

For the past fifty years, immigration law has resisted integration ofGideon v. Wainwright’s legacy of appointed counsel for the poor. Today, however, this resistance has given way toGideon’s migration. At the level of everyday practice, criminal defense attorneys appointed pursuant to Gideon now advise clients on the immigration consequences of convictions, negotiate“immigration safe” plea bargains, defend clients charged with immigration crimes, and, in some model programs, even represent criminal defendants in immigration court. A formal right to appointed counsel in immigration proceedings has yet to be established, but proposals grounded in the constitution, statutes, and expanded government funding are gaining momentum.From the perspective of criminal defense, the changing role of Gideon-appointed counsel raises questions about the breadth and depth of immigration assistance that should developunder the defense umbrella.

From the perspective of immigration legal services, the potential importation of aGideon-inspired right to counsel requires consideration of the appropriate scope and design for an immigration defender system. This Essay does not attempt to resolve these challenging questions, but rather provides a framework for further reflection grounded in lessons learned from the criminal system’s implementation ofGideon.

The rise of immigration prosecution as the central feature of the federal criminal justice system challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between the criminal and immigration systems. This Article shows that, in the domain of immigration, the immigration state and criminal state operate as an integrated process in which defendants’ rights and criminal procedural mechanisms have been redefined. On a doctrinal level, the integration of immigration and criminal enforcement has meant that rights traditionally accorded criminal defendants - such asMirandaand bail pending trial - are unevenly distributed along alienage lines. On an institutional level, immigration prosecution has supported an alternative federal adjudicatory structure, largely outside the confines of Article III criminal courts, that is defined by quick, mass processing of guilty pleas.

Drawing on court rulings, government documents, legislative history, statistical data, and interviews, this Article argues that there are two significant consequences of the federal immigration prosecution regime. First, it incentivizes prosecutors to borrow the tools of civil immigration enforcement to support criminal prosecution, thereby distorting the criminal procedural rules that would otherwise apply. Second, it deputizes criminal prosecutors to act as de facto immigration screeners, thereby threatening the substance and process of immigration law. This Article’s study of the interdependence between the immigration agency and the criminal prosecutor thus reveals a fundamental disruption in one of the central dichotomies in our legal system - the civil/criminal divide. In practice, the immigration agency interacts with criminal process to erode procedural protections afforded criminal defendants, expand criminal law enforcement power beyond the confines of the criminal state, and reorder the aims of the criminal law.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 has focused attention on whether federal law preempts the prosecution of state immigration crime in local criminal courts. Absent from the current discussion, however, is an appreciation of how Arizona’s existing body of criminal immigration law—passed well before SB 1070 and currently in force in the state—functions on the ground to regulate migration. Drawing on statistical data, prosecution policies, trial-level court records, and interviews with stakeholders, this Article is the first to investigate the practice of local immigration prosecution. It does so in the hotbed of immigration enforcement—Maricopa County, Arizona—through a detailed case study of the implementation of a 2005 Arizona alien smuggling law. Specifically, this Article reveals four key aspects of the national immigration system that have shifted in the face of state criminalization: the functional definition of immigration crime, the breadth of state immigration enforcement authority, the allocation of federal resources for criminal prosecution, and the exercise of executive control over immigration policy. Through this analysis, this Article shows how Arizona, despite the formal prohibition on state and local immigration regulation, has redefined and restructured the federal system for punishing immigration crime. In so doing, this Article fosters a richer and more accurate understanding of the role of the local prosecutor in immigration federalism.