Thousands of immigrant children who came to the United States without being accompanied by a parent or guardian are now at imminent risk of losing the attorneys assisting on their legal cases, amid cuts in government funding, advocates warned this week.
The Trump administration has severed ties with nearly a hundred legal organizations across the country that provide immigration advice and has been funneling kids into fast-tracked court hearings.
“The Trump administration is working to strip unaccompanied children of legal representation so they can be deported faster and with less scrutiny. We cannot allow that to happen,” said Ana Devereaux, senior managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.
Federal officials are set to end a contract providing legal counsel to more than 20,000 children on 31 July. They have already refused to reimburse organizations for $65m in work completed since December, attorneys say, unless those organizations agree to violate their young clients’ confidentiality and turn over sensitive information, such as unredacted medical evaluations and data about kids’ broader immigration cases, according to Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, the contractor that administers legal services for those kids.
“These sorts of detailed disclosures could provide the government with, really, a roadmap for mass deportation of children,” said Aber said.
The federal administration’s ultimatum is pressing many of the affected non-profits toward layoffs, hiring freezes or even financial collapse and all but ensuring that young immigrants will have to face court alone.
“Without a lawyer, children win the right to stay in the United States less than 10% of the time. Immigration judges are nearly 100 times less likely to grant relief to a child without counsel,” said Elizabeth Young, a former regional deputy chief immigration judge, who resigned last year.
She added: “Due process is the foundation of American justice … When children are forced to navigate one of the most complex areas of law alone, that promise of fairness becomes little more than an illusion.”
Unaccompanied children often reach the US while fleeing human trafficking, persecution, neglect, abuse or abandonment, a reality that the nation’s lawmakers have recognized through policies meant to protect some of the world’s most vulnerable kids.
But under the second Trump administration, an immigration system that was crafted so children could have their legal claims carefully assessed is being rebuilt to fuel the mass deportation machine, and kids are being ordered deported before other government agencies can process their applications to stay legally, experts warn.
“These children are not and should never be leverage in a political game. They are human beings – kids who have a legally and morally recognized right to have their cases heard,” Aber said. “The administration’s actions are directed at speeding up their deportation instead of protecting them, but abandoning children to meet arbitrary mass deportation targets is immoral.”
The impending funding cliff later this month comes amid reports that federal officials are planning to send unaccompanied children en masse to Texas, where the immigration courts, circuit judges and state leaders are generally friendly to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
To do so, federal officials reportedly first turned to the Texas attorney general’s office – run by Ken Paxton, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest allies – for help representing the kids, then pivoted toward the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, a small state entity tasked with criminal defense, not civil immigration work. Scott Ehlers, the Indigent Defense Commission’s executive director, told them their request would probably violate his mandate.
Meanwhile, some of Texas’s legal organizations with a long history of representing immigrant kids are on the brink of closure in part because the federal government has not reimbursed them for their services.
Likewise, one major legal provider nationally, Kids in Need of Defense, founded by the actor Angelina Jolie and the Microsoft Corporation, announced it was canceling its participation as a subcontractor representing unaccompanied children last month based on $20m in overdue payments.
“You can imagine when organizations of that caliber, with the support that they’ve had throughout the years, cannot sustain this work, it tells you everything you need to know about the severity of what is happening in this field and what the administration is doing,” Aber said.
“And that’s happening right now, even before the contract expires. So the damage is already being felt, and I assume that we’re going to see hundreds and hundreds of children going to court alone.”
