WASHINGTON – Sometime next week, a child will stand before an immigration judge without a lawyer. That became more likely Friday when a federal contract providing legal services to roughly 24,000 unaccompanied migrant children across the United States expired without renewal, leaving approximately 100 legal aid organizations without clear funding to continue their work.
The lapse arrives at a moment of maximum exposure. The Trump administration has made mass deportation the defining mission of its immigration enforcement posture, and advocates say the contract’s collapse, combined with reports that payments were already being withheld before the formal expiration, looks less like bureaucratic delay than calculated policy.
“We have no understanding of what’s going to happen to those children come next week,” said Melissa Lopez, an attorney with Estrella del Paso, one of the affected organizations. “We don’t know if they’re going to have legal representation.”
The children at stake are among the most legally vulnerable people in the American immigration system. Unaccompanied minors who arrive at the United States border without parents or guardians are entitled under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 to government-funded legal counsel as they navigate hearings that can determine whether they are deported to the countries they fled or granted asylum or special protected status. That statutory right remains on the books. The funding to honor it, as of Friday, does not.
Organizations serving children under the contract report that the Trump administration had been withholding payment on outstanding invoices even before the contract formally lapsed, forcing layoffs and furloughs across the network of nonprofits and law school clinics that form the backbone of the migrant legal system. The picture that emerges is one of systematic financial strangulation.
“They are clearly trying to destroy the program by grinding down the financial health of nonprofits,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigration Law. “We’ve seen layoffs and furloughs, and we will see a lot more of that if these invoices aren’t paid.”
The contract administered the Unaccompanied Children Program, a federal arrangement through which the government paid nonprofits and law school clinics to represent children in removal proceedings. Some of those children are fleeing gang violence or domestic abuse and may qualify for asylum or special immigrant juvenile status, a designation available to minors who were abused, neglected, or abandoned. Others are seeking to reunite with family members already living in the United States. Without lawyers, many will not know which path, if any, is open to them.
Members of Congress have begun applying pressure. Representatives Chris Deluzio and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania wrote to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, demanding answers about what steps the administration was taking to ensure children’s legal rights were being honored. Kennedy’s department oversees the program that administered the now-expired contract. Al Jazeera reported that the administration did not respond to press requests for comment.
The Trump administration’s posture toward unaccompanied migrant children has hardened progressively. Earlier this year, ICE expanded its operations to target migrant children’s American sponsors, the adults who had accepted legal responsibility for children released from government custody. That expansion spread fear through immigrant communities, causing some sponsors to withdraw and leaving children in extended government care. The Supreme Court separately rejected the administration’s bid to end birthright citizenship, though that ruling offered no protection to children who entered without documentation.
The end of the legal services contract accelerates a pattern that advocates describe as deliberate dismantlement. The administration has not technically repealed the law requiring legal services. It has simply stopped paying for them, let the contract expire, and left children to appear in removal proceedings without anyone in their corner.
Lopez said her organization would attempt to continue serving clients through alternative funding streams, though she offered no guarantees. “We are going to try,” she said. “But we don’t know what next week looks like.”
That uncertainty is now the condition facing tens of thousands of children: scheduled for hearings, legally entitled to representation, and without any assurance that a lawyer will show up when their names are called. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act has not been amended. The children’s rights under it have not been rescinded. But the contract is gone, invoices remain unpaid, and the organizations that once stood between those children and deportation are now counting their remaining resources week by week, uncertain how much longer they can hold.
