To meet the growing demand, the Latino Community Association in Central Oregon has hired its own immigration attorney to handle asylum seeking issues.

After moving to Bend, Patricia Pizarro first offered her legal services as a volunteer, but the association, which had been looking for an attorney to help with immigration work, offered her a full-time job instead, according to the association.

Pizarro, a first-generation American, was born in Chicago. She moved to Bend earlier this year.

“I am honored to be joining the Latino Community Association’s immigration and advocacy program in the efforts to better serve our immigrant community in Central Oregon,” Pizarro said in a prepared statement.

Legal issues for the Latino population in Central Oregon have been growing just as their population and percentage of people in the workforce have grown over the past decade.

Based on anecdotal information, the association has been hearing that sometimes Central Oregon folks would get lost or referred multiple times to different attorneys in Portland and legal issues would fall through the cracks, said Daniel Altamirano Hernandez, Latino Community Association of Central Oregon interim executive director.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos made up 9.3% of the 208,500 people living in Deschutes County in 2020. It’s even higher in Crook County, where about 15% of the population is Latino.

“We see new families every day,” said Altamirano Hernandez. “We want to help them make this place a home. The hiring of Patricia is a testament showing that Central Oregon is growing in a diverse fashion and that Portland metro isn’t the only place in Oregon that’s growing.”

As a workforce, about 10,315 people employed in Central Oregon identified as Latino or Hispanic in the first quarter of the year. That’s a 28% increase over 2019, according to census bureau data.

Asylum seekers and those seeking to immigrate from Latin America often struggle with making rent and the overall cost of living in Central Oregon, according to the association’s newsletter. Often the waitlist is long and work visas take time to process, according to the association.

Generally, the population skews younger than the rest of the Central Oregon population, according to the Latinos in Central Oregon 2020 report.

In 2018, the year for which the data is most current, the majority worked in the leisure and hospitality industry, retail, health care, construction and agriculture.

The association sees itself as a catchall community resource for those who need the information to be culturally and linguistically appropriate, Altamirano Hernandez said.

“We want to help immigrants thrive in Central Oregon,”Altamirano Hernandez said. “We’re in this for the long haul, and the legal services are part of our core services.”