25,000 Children Lose Legal Protections as Contract Ends

More than 25,000 unaccompanied immigrant children are expected to face deportation proceedings without lawyers as soon as Monday, after the federal contract that funds their legal representation expired Friday without renewal. As NPR reports, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) declined to renew the contract held by the Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that oversees legal services for children who enter the United States without a parent or guardian.

For more than two decades, Congress has funded a nationwide network of nearly 100 legal service providers to help these children navigate immigration court. The obligation was reaffirmed by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which, as The Guardian notes, requires the Department of Health and Human Services to “ensure to the greatest extent practicable” that unaccompanied minors have legal representation in deportation proceedings.

The funding crisis escalated in November, when ORR stopped paying providers after they declined to hand over confidential information about their young clients. The attorneys say the records are protected by attorney-client privilege. In a statement issued Thursday, Acacia said: “The government is withholding payment for work that has already been performed in order to extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to.”

Acacia said it has not been paid for representation and court assistance work funded since December, leaving an estimated $65 million in unpaid invoices. The financial strain has already forced cuts across the network. The Associated Press reported that ProBAR, the American Bar Association project that provides legal services in South Texas, laid off 20% of its staff this week. Mid-South Immigration Advocates has laid off seven employees since 2025, is closing its physical offices in Nashville and Memphis at the end of September and expects to close its law firm entirely soon, while Estrella El Paso, which represents 243 children in western Texas and New Mexico, stopped accepting new cases in July.

“The government is trying to eliminate our work in this program because they know that without attorneys children will be deported,” Melissa Lopez, Estrella’s executive director, told the AP. Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center, said the administration is “clearly trying to destroy the program by grinding down the financial health of nonprofits.”

The stakes are visible in courtrooms. The Guardian’s reporting from Judge Lisa W. Ling’s immigration court in lower Manhattan found that just a quarter of more than 300 cases involving detained children had attorneys assigned between late June and the end of July. Children as young as three appeared by video; some sat in classrooms, others in storage closets at shelters. In one hearing, a Guatemalan teen named Nilmar asked for more time to find a lawyer after the judge said he did not appear eligible for asylum. “Unfortunately I can’t do this any further. This is the eighth time that we’ve adjourned your case,” Ling said, granting him voluntary departure.

Advocates say the consequences of appearing without counsel are severe. Alexa Sendukas, an attorney at the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, told NPR that unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the United States less than 1% of the time without a lawyer. Shaina Aber, Acacia’s executive director, warned of children being “railroaded into taking voluntary departure, AKA self-deport,” even where they would face real danger at home.

The administration has not said who, if anyone, will replace the network. Acacia said it received notice July 29 that ORR was considering a new contract, potentially with different providers, but without details. HHS, which oversees ORR, said in a statement that “ORR remains fully compliant with legal and regulatory obligations and does not act in any way that could dissuade a child from seeking appropriate legal relief.”

Meanwhile, The Texas Tribune reported that Justice Department officials and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office approached the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, a criminal-defense agency, about representing immigrant children — a request outside its mandate. Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the child resettlement agency, called the idea “not legal representation at all. It is the Trump deportation agenda being executed by a political ally paid for by taxpayer dollars.”

Critics see the outreach as part of a broader effort to transfer unaccompanied children to Texas, where judges deny asylum at higher rates and an average of four deportation flights leave the state daily. “We are concerned about a potential transfer of children to Texas where there is no independent oversight of facilities and away from many of the attorneys with whom children have built trust,” Aber said.

Attorneys say they will not abandon their clients even without pay. “We have an ethical responsibility. We can’t just drop a case,” Mickey Donovan, director of legal services at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told NPR. “We’ll be there in court on Monday.”

The coming week will test that promise. Legal providers have filed an emergency motion in federal court — part of the ongoing case Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto v. United States — seeking to force the government to pay the roughly $65 million it owes and to preserve the program. A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 6. Until then, thousands of children will walk into immigration court uncertain whether anyone will speak for them.