Two leaders of The Bronx Defenders are pressing Mayor Zohran Mamdani to pour more money into the city’s legal aid system and fix the way it pays the nonprofits that run it, arguing that funding one piece of the safety net while starving the rest leaves low-income New Yorkers exposed. Their case landed in a June 4 op-ed in City Limits, written as the mayor’s proposed budget moved toward a final vote.
The authors are Juval O. Scott, executive director of The Bronx Defenders, and Samantha Espada, president of the group’s chapter of UAW-ALAA Local 2325, the union that represents legal aid workers. Their argument is about coverage. When someone poor hits a legal crisis, they wrote, it rarely stays in one courtroom.
“An arrest can lead to eviction. A family court case can destabilize housing and income. An immigration case can trigger detention, family separation, and economic collapse,” they wrote. “What begins in one legal system often spirals into another.”
Scott and Espada credit Mamdani’s proposed budget for boosting funding for Right to Counsel, the program that gives low-income tenants a lawyer to fight eviction. Their complaint is that the increase stops there. Without matching money for criminal defense, family court, and immigration representation, they argue, the city strengthens one wall of the house and leaves the others thin.
They list the stakes: more time in jail before trial, parents facing life-altering family court rulings without steady counsel, tenants losing time while their housing hangs in limbo, and immigrant New Yorkers navigating detention and deportation. They tie the urgency to federal enforcement, writing that “the federal government is escalating enforcement against immigrant New Yorkers and signaling a broader crackdown on constitutionally protected speech and protest.”
They also want the city to fix how it pays providers. Nonprofit providers deliver the services first and then wait, sometimes months, sometimes more than a year, to get paid. To cover the gap, the authors wrote, organizations take on debt to make payroll, delay hiring, and cut services. “That is not efficiency,” they wrote. “It is a transfer of risk from government onto nonprofits, their workers, and the communities they serve.”
That payment-delay problem isn’t new, and the City Council has been chipping at it. In an October 2025 announcement, Speaker Adrienne Adams laid out Introduction 1392, which would require city agencies to pay at least 25 percent of a contract’s annual value each quarter for certain Department of Homeless Services and Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice contracts starting January 1, 2026, with a broader pilot for contracts of $1 million or more beginning in 2027. The Council also passed Introduction 1247-B on October 9, requiring the city to advance 50 percent of a nonprofit’s contract value once the comptroller registers it.
Scott and Espada call this a test of what Mamdani says he stands for. The mayor “has consistently recognized the value of legal workers’ labor,” they wrote, and now has “an opportunity to show that affordability and labor justice require a more holistic understanding of public obligation.” They say affordability means more than rent and groceries. It is “whether families can remain housed after an arrest,” and “whether a housing crisis becomes a family crisis.”
Their two specific demands, laid out before the budget is finalized: robust funding for indigent legal services pegged to what providers say they need to retain staff, and a real overhaul of the contracting and payment system, built with the nonprofit sector and backed by enforceable timelines.
“We are ready to work with this administration,” they wrote. “We are also ready to hold it accountable.”
