More than 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children could be left without legal representation as soon as the end of this month, after the Trump administration moved to terminate funding for their attorneys and withheld tens of millions of dollars alrEADy owed to the organizations serving them, advocates warned this week.
At the center of the crisis is a federal contract set to expire July 31 that has been providing lawyers to children who arrived in the United States without a parent or guardian. The government has also refused to pay $65 million for legal work carried out since December — unless recipient organizations hand over confidential client data, including unredacted medical evaluations and detailed immigration case files, according to Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, which administers the program.
"These sorts of detailed disclosures could provide the government with, really, a roadmap for mass deportation of children," Aber said.
The consequences of losing counsel are severe. Elizabeth Young, a former regional deputy chief immigration judge who stepped down last year, said the numbers tell a stark story: children without lawyers prevail in fewer than one in ten cases, while judges grant relief at nearly a hundred times the rate when an attorney is present.
"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," Young said. 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."
Across the country, close to a hundred legal nonprofits have already been cut off from federal immigration work, and many of those still operating are now weighing layoffs, hiring freezes or outright closure because of the unpaid reimbursements. Advocates say children are simultaneously being funneled into accelerated court proceedings — in some cases receiving deportation orders before separate government agencies have even finished processing their applications to remain legally.
The children at risk typically fled trafficking, persecution, abuse, neglect or abandonment. Legislation was designed specifically to ensure their claims received careful, individualized review. Critics argue that framework is now being dismantled to serve mass-removal goals.
"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."
A separate dimension of the situation involves Texas, where federal officials are reportedly planning to concentrate unaccompanied children's cases, given that immigration courts, circuit judges and state leadership there have broadly aligned with the administration's enforcement priorities. Attempts to find substitute legal help have stumbled: officials first approached the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, then turned to the Texas Indigent Defense Commission — a small body focused on criminal matters. That agency's executive director, Scott Ehlers, told federal officials the request would likely fall outside his organization's legal mandate.
The financial fallout has already claimed a prominent casualty. Kids in Need of Defense — a major legal services provider founded by actor Angelina Jolie and Microsoft Corporation — announced last month it was withdrawing as a subcontractor after $20 million in payments went unmet.
"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."
The Trump administration's position is not given in the source account.