Six students from the University of California, Davis, will go to jail today.

They are among more than a dozen law students volunteering with a new project providing legal assistance to individuals being detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Yuba County Jail in Marysville, Calif.

As part of the King Hall INS Detention Project, students and a supervising attorney visit the jail Tuesday afternoons to make presentations on immigration law, provide legal counsel to individuals and identify those detainees who could be helped with further intervention.

Established in March, the project is a joint effort of the Immigration Clinic at UC Davis' School of Law, the Federal Defender's Office in Sacramento, and pro bono immigration attorneys in Sacramento and San Francisco. It is responding to the legal community's growing concern for the increasing numbers of INS detainees -- most of them poor -- who are languishing in jails and prisons without a right to counsel at the government's expense.

Marysville is one of Northern California's largest INS detention centers. Most of the 250 individuals there are being held pending resolution of asylum or deportation cases; few were detained as a result of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.

"Immigration law is extremely complicated, and people up against it are really in need of help," says Sarah Kate Heilbrun, a second-year law student participating in the project.

Each week, she and the other students attend a non-credit seminar to learn about immigration law. And on behalf of the detainees, they research immigration law, prepare court documents and provide assistance to pro bono attorneys in San Francisco, where hearings are held.

The project has already won stays of removal for two women and is petitioning the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for review of their cases.

The Immigration Clinic, one of four at the law school, provides community education and free legal services to low-income immigrants facing deportation.