On July 31, a federal contract expired. No press conference, no signing ceremony, no announcement from the podium. And with that expiration, around 22,000 children who came to this country alone — some of them too young to form a sentence — lost the lawyers for migrant children who protect them from deportation.
The contract belonged to the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit that for years has held a $356 million agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services and passed those dollars along to more than 100 small legal aid organizations across the country.
Those legal aid organizations are the ones with lawyers for migrant children who actually sit next to a scared kid in immigration court.
As of August 1, that money is gone, and some of those organizations are shutting down their children's programs entirely.
What does that mean? Acacia's own analysis found that a child who goes to immigration court without a lawyer is 99% likely to be ordered deported. Not 60%. Not 80%. Ninety-nine.
The Law: Government Must Provide Lawyers For Migrant Childen
This isn’t a case of the government deciding it doesn’t want to be generous.
Congress made child representation a legal obligation in 2008 when it passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, on the reasoning that a child who arrives in the United States with no parent is a walking target for traffickers and abusers.
The federal government has been contracting the work out to specialized nonprofits ever since.
The work of those nonprofits sounds nothing like corporate litigation.
Attorneys bring teddy bears to first meetings. They use toy courtroom models to explain to a seven-year-old what a judge is.
Monica Valencia, a managing attorney with the San Diego nonprofit Al Otro Lado, told KPBS her office has represented clients as young as two years old — children too young to spell their own names, let alone argue an asylum claim in court.
"Children are not political pawns," Valencia said.
How We Got Here
The lapse in funding for organizations that provide lawyers for migrant children didn’t appear suddenly. It’s the result of a battle that’s been happening for well over a year.
It started in April 2025, when DOGE sent Acacia a stop-work order. It escalated in November 2025, when the administration stopped paying invoices for representation the subcontracted attorneys had already provided to unaccompanied migrant children.
The government's lawyers told a court that HHS withheld the money because Acacia refused to give the department information about the children it represented.
The attorneys said that information is protected by attorney-client privilege, and refused.
By this summer, providers said they were owed roughly $65 million. They sued. On August 6, a federal judge in California ordered the government to pay.
Acacia confirmed the following week that money covering six of the nine months owed had started to arrive, with the rest still in progress.
Meanwhile, the children's cases weren’t paused. Judges kept calling dockets.
Legal aid groups kept showing up unpaid, because their ethical obligations to provide lawyers for migrant childen didn’t end when the contract did.
We’re grateful to the lawyers who haven’t lost their compassion, empathy, ethics — their humanity. If you feel the same way, please sign our letter to lawyers and legal aid organizations that work with the Acacia Center for Justice. You can sign our letter at the end of this article. (or go there now)
Who the Trump Administration Wanted to Hire
In early August, a Federal Register notice revealed the government planned to give $150 million to the Burke Law Group, a Houston firm that describes itself as a specialist in environmental and regulatory matters for corporate clients.
Out of roughly two dozen attorneys, there are only two who handle immigration and asylum.
Founder Marcella Burke served in the first Trump administration at both the EPA and the Interior Department; a founding partner now works as an EPA assistant administrator.
Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro is listed as senior counsel.
On August 11, Burke Law Group declined the contract in a brief social media post, without explaining why.
Four days before that, HHS had already issued a no-bid contract worth up to $244 million to Our Rescue, the Utah group formerly known as Operation Underground Railroad — the organization behind the 2023 film Sound of Freedom.
Its founder, Tim Ballard, left in 2023 amid lawsuits from women who accused him of exploiting his anti-trafficking work to abuse them; a separate 2024 federal suit alleging sex trafficking and forced labor remains ongoing.
The group is now led by Derek Benner, a former senior ICE official. It’s unclear from public filings that Our Rescue employs immigration attorneys at all, and its entire 2025 operating budget was about $37 million — a fraction of the contract it was just awarded.
The contract is for six months, through February 6, 2027.
A third, smaller contract worth $20 million went to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, whose recent federal work included resettling Afrikaner refugees.
USCRI attorneys reportedly started showing up in immigration court last week, claiming to be lawyers for migrant children they’d never met — confusing judges and attorneys who were already handling those cases.
What This is
Strip away the procurement language and it becomes clear. The experienced network was defunded. The replacements are politically connected, inexperienced, and in one case they were only awarded the contract after another firm turned it down.
The contracts that do exist cover about 1,800 children living in federal shelters. The other 22,000, living with sponsors and family members while facing deportation, are covered by nothing.
Bilal Askaryar of Acacia framed the question as one about national character: does a country offer a frightened child a lawyer who knows how to talk to children, or assign them to an organization built to move cases out the door?
Right now, the answer coming from Washington is neither. Right now, the answer is nobody at all.
