Legal Aid That Helped Abuse Victim Threatened with Trump Cut (1)

When a Baltimore mother needed a protective order against her ex-husband, she found help at Maryland Legal Aid.

The Moroccan immigrant, 33, who lives with her four-year-old daughter, was still hospitalized with bruises when attorneys picked up her case and obtained the order within a week.

“They cried with me, they clapped their hands for me, they gave me resources for everything, everything,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used due to safety concerns.

Maryland Legal Aid clients and similar providers of low-income assistance throughout the US could find it harder to get help if the Trump administration is successful in eliminating an important funder of legal aid providers.

Trump’s 2026 budget proposal requests $21 million for an “orderly closeout” of the Legal Services Corporation, which was established in 1974 to provide financial support for legal aid to low-income people. The independent agency provides funding to 130 non-profit legal aid programs and has requested $2.1 billion for fiscal 2026, which starts Oct. 1.

The impact of shutting down the LSC would be particularly severe in Baltimore, the state’s most-populous city, where 20% of nearly 600,000 residents live in poverty, according to the US Census.

LSC-funded programs provide aid to those with an annual income at or below 125% of the federal poverty guidelines, which, in 2025, is $19,563 for an individual and $40,188 for a family of four, according to the LSC website.

Maryland Legal Aid is already struggling to cover those in need, and a funding cut while demand is rising is “really concerning,” the group’s executive director, Vicki Schultz, said.

“There aren’t enough of us on a good day,” Schultz said of her organization’s 177 staff lawyers.

While MDLA gets just 14% of its funding from Legal Services Corporation, losing this money would mean serving fewer people, Schultz said. Its 2024 annual budget was more than $45 million though Schultz said funding is “never enough,” and they have to be careful and clear with clients about what services they can provide.

Big Reach

Maryland Legal Aid is the largest legal services provider in the state with 12 offices stretching from rural western Maryland to suburban Washington and coastal communities in the Chesapeake Bay.

Located in a five-story downtown building, its Baltimore headquarters is not far from both the state and city courthouses and the National Aquarium. The Baltimore office has three walk-in days per week, helping nearly 80 clients weekly. But statewide, an average of 200 calls are fielded per day. Two-thirds of clients across the state are female and the majority are Black.

Most clients in Maryland are looking for help in fighting evictions or other housing cases, getting their criminal record expunged, addressing worker rights and benefits, or seeking defense in domestic violence cases. Legal services doesn’t help with active criminal cases, medical malpractice, police and attorney misconduct, or immigration.

The housing unit intake helped 2,240 people avoid or delay eviction in 2024, and is as busy as an “emergency room on a Saturday night,” supervisory attorney Kyle Coleman said.

Coleman said a majority of his clients face eviction from federally subsidized housing and often seek help on the same day as their court hearing. The Baltimore eviction rate is 2.3 times higher than the national average.

“If you don’t have legal aid, you see a very confused tenant,” he said.

The victim’s rights unit statewide mainly serves women, too, said Sophia Barilone, its deputy director. The group’s 250 clients in the past year experienced sexual assault, human trafficking, and domestic violence, she said.

“We are literally saving their lives,” Barilone said.

‘Critical Work’

With no family and no support system in the US, the domestic violence client who sought assistance while hospitalized said lawyers helped her become aware of her rights as well as those of her daughter.

The woman said MDLA attorneys drove to meet her because she didn’t have enough money for transportation and provided an interpreter to translate between English and Darija, a Moroccan dialect of Arabic that is her first language.

“I hope nobody ever has to go through what I went through,” she said. “But with Maryland Legal Aid, I can do it again, because I know that I will get the support that I need.”

Cristina Meneses, senior managing director for University of Maryland’s Law Clinic, said legal aid attorneys are doing “critical work.”

She said her group handles criminal cases and immigration and can also provide aid to undocumented immigrants. LSC-funded providers can’t take on undocumented immigrants unless they’re survivors of domestic violence.

“Legal aid really helps individuals maintain and improve their lives,” Meneses said. “Without these services, people will be experiencing homelessness, violence, and all the collateral consequences of having a legal issue.”

Neither the House or Senate appropriations committees have released their bills that fund Legal Services Corporation, which will provide the first sign of whether Republicans plan to follow through with Trump’s proposal to eliminate it.

Republicans have long tried to defund the organization, and Trump had attempted to eliminate it in his 2018 budget proposal during his first term.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that will consider the measure, said LSC is “obviously essential” and that he’s going to “fight very hard to preserve the funding.”