Immigrants are often victims of loan sharks. Now, Pa. immigrants have a better option to pay their legal fees.

For years, Alex Brophy’s client was on a monthly payment plan.

The Honduran man had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Texas and flown to Pennsylvania, thousands of miles away from his Los Angeles family. Brophy appealed his client’s case multiple times, and finally won — but even after the victory, his client remained on a payment plan and eventually ran out of money.

“I really believed in his case, and we kept fighting it,” said Brophy, who is founding partner of Brophy & Lenahan PC in Newton Square. “This is a situation where there was a really, really needy person, no criminal record, spent almost two years in detention, and ran out of money.”

Although Brophy has never dropped a client for not paying him, that’s not the case for all immigration lawyers. This, Brophy said, is the perfect example of someone who could have benefited from a loan.

Now, Pennsylvania immigrants have access to immigration legal loans through Capital Good Fund, a Rhode Island-based lending nonprofit that has just expanded its services into Pennsylvania in partnership with the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

“There aren’t a lot of financial options in the marketplace for immigrants, and there are some very high-interest loan options that are really shocking to those of us who have a bank and who have credit,” said Reid Trautz, director of AILA’s Practice & Professionalism Center. “It makes it difficult for people to take that next immigration step, whether that’s paying the required government fees or engaging a lawyer to help them navigate the processes.”

“I’ve been doing this for 17 years,” Trautz continued, “and Capital Good Fund was the first company to come along that solved this problem.”

The Philadelphia area does have a few local financing options, such as Finanta/Community First Fund, a community development financial Institution that provides loans and grants to immigrants for everything from starting a business to purchasing a home. There is also the Pennsylvania Immigrant Family Unity Project, a publicly funded defense counsel project for detained immigrants, made up of nonprofit organizations across the state.

“Philadelphia is blessed to have some capacity,” said Will Gonzalez, executive director of Ceiba, a coalition of Philly-based Latino community organizations. “[Immigrants] are economic engines, and anything that could help those catalysts of economic development, we want to foster that. So to have this new source of capital for unauthorized immigrants is great.”

Immigration legal services can cost as much as $20,000, depending on the case. And if immigrants can’t afford a lawyer, court-appointed lawyers don’t exist — they simply must move through their case without representation.

The problem is widespread: In 2019, 77% of immigration court cases had no legal representation, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). And representation unsurprisingly plays a major role in the success of an immigration case. In Pennsylvania, there were 5,385 deportations of people without representation in fiscal year 2023, compared with 792 deportations of people with representation.

Studies also show that immigrants with lawyers are 3.5 times more likely to be granted bond and up to 10 times more likely to establish their right to remain in the United States than those without immigration lawyers.

“We know from firsthand experience that people with no legal representation are railroaded by the system, their rights often violated and then fast tracked into deportation,” said Jasmine Rivera, interim executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigrant and Citizenship Coalition.

This has often made immigrants vulnerable to predatory loans to finance legal services, or forced them to pay for services on their credit cards with extremely high interest.

Trautz, for example, said that five or six years ago, loans available to immigrants had annual interest rates as high as 30% (and surmised that those rates would be even higher today), and some had very strict credit approval, making it hard for immigrants with little to no credit to access the loans in the first place.

Capital Good Fund, on the other hand, has a current interest rate of 15.99%. The company also works closely with clients to determine their financial picture outside of a credit score, offer them financial education and payment flexibility, and ensure that clients are working with good lawyers.

“We’ve struck up our partnership [with Capital Good Fund] because we didn’t see anyone else doing this in a way that was not only affordable, but also helps people understand this financial system and establish credit without being onerous,” Trautz said.

Andy Posner, the founder and CEO of Capital Good Fund, said the idea for the lending program came from focus groups with the Latino community in Providence, R.I., in 2009, where he heard numerous stories about people going to loan sharks to pay for immigration fees. It was a service gap he wanted to fill, and Capital Good Fund was founded that year.

Being a nonprofit is part of what allows Capital Good Fund to keep its interest rates so low, Posner said. The program is designed to be self-sustaining, with the interest rate covering the cost of running the program, but it doesn’t need to worry about making large returns to investors. The program can also spend more time evaluating applicants’ finances, as opposed to other companies that may simply rely on a credit score.

“We’ve disproven the notion that lending to lower-income folks and immigrants is risky,” Posner said. “As of [Dec. 20], we have done 920 immigration loans for just over $5 million, and our repayment rate has been 96%. A bank would be jealous of that.”

The lending program makes it more possible for immigrants to achieve a successful outcome and also lead a successful life in the U.S. One former client, Posner recalled, had an informal cleaning business, and took out a loan to get her green card. Afterward, she was able to formalize her business — including paying taxes and getting insurance — took financial coaching with Capital Good Fund to build her credit, and was able to then grow her business and purchase her first home.

It’s an example, Posner said, of how one loan can change an immigrant’s life and enable an upward trajectory.