Thousands of migrant children risk being left without lawyers: ‘They want to put them into the deportation machinery’

A 12-year-old girl made it to the United States after enduring labor trafficking and abuse from the age of five; lawyers are now seeking an immigration benefit on her behalf. A deaf, autistic boy was kidnapped on his way to the United States; nearly a year later, his mother managed to rescue him, and activists helped him obtain documents allowing him to remain in the country. In both cases, according to the organizations involved, the children would have ended up being deported or, through lack of information, denied access to legal avenues for remaining in the country without the assistance of immigration lawyers.Starting this Friday, thousands of migrant children in the United States, from infants to teenagers, risk losing the legal assistance that has supported them for years in their immigration cases. That is when contracts funded since 2003 by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) expire. The contracts have supported a nationwide network of 100 organizations providing legal services to unaccompanied minors, those who arrived without their parents or legal guardians, as well as children in immigration custody.The move deepens an existing crisis. In November 2025, the HHS withheld more than $65 million in previously approved funding backed by lawmakers from both parties. Without that money, organizations have been forced to turn away new clients or scale back, and in some cases shut down, their operations altogether.“We don’t know what’s going to happen on August 1 because the government has not informed us of the transition plan for the 20,000 children who have representation under this contract,” says Shaina Aber, executive director of Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit that received the government funds and distributed them to other institutions that — like them — work on behalf of children. “It will really depend on whether the attorneys have alternative funding that allows them to continue.”Aber says that about 30 organizations in the network are operating under what she describes as a “challenging” financial reality. The situation, she explains, is forcing many lawyers to have “difficult” conversations with children about the possibility that they may no longer be able to represent them. These are minors with asylum claims, applications for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (for children abandoned by one or both parents), or cases involving victims of trafficking, all forms of immigration relief that are difficult to pursue without legal representation and that Donald Trump has made harder to obtain since returning to office for a second term in January 2025.As organizations brace for what lies ahead, it emerged in early July that the Justice Department had asked the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, a state agency that provides legal defense in criminal cases for low-income residents, to help represent migrant children facing deportation proceedings. The commission confirmed to EL PAÍS that it had received the proposal but did not say whether it would accept it. According to a report by The Texas Tribune, the commission’s executive director told the Justice Department that representing unaccompanied minors falls outside the organization’s expertise and scope.Unlike criminal courts, immigration courts are not required to guarantee legal representation, even for minors. Advocacy groups, however, argue that due process cannot truly exist if children and teenagers do not understand the system they face, the penalties involved, the legal terminology used, or the consequences of the proceedings.“It’s coercive and traumatizing”Advocacy groups stress the risks children face when they appear in court or are questioned by government officials without a lawyer present.A child in federal custody was interrogated for hours by government officials. “They told him he would be stuck in detention, that his relatives would be detained and that he had no right to apply for asylum,” says Alexa Sendukas, one of the lawyers leading the Migrant Children and Youth Program at the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project (GHIRP), recounting the experience of one of the minors her organization represents.“For a child who arrives after a trip from another country, often a very difficult journey and frequently under traumatic circumstances, this will make them give up and return because they think it’s their only option, but it’s not. The law says they have rights, but those rights are not being respected,” says Sendukas, describing the officials’ conduct as “coercive and traumatizing.”In a similar case, Marie Silver, senior attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center, disclosed in a sworn declaration filed in court in November 2025 that, while reviewing the records of an unaccompanied minor in custody, she discovered a letter she had never seen before. In the letter, authorities told the child that anyone who agreed to return voluntarily to their country within the next 72 hours would “still have the opportunity to apply for a visa […] in the future.” But that anyone who chose to have a hearing before an immigration judge, or who said they feared returning to their country, would be placed in federal custody “for a prolonged period of time” or expose their guardians or parents to detention and deportation. In an April 2026 ruling, a federal judge expressly barred agents from presenting this letter again.GHIRP also represents unaccompanied minors who had previously been released from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the agency responsible for children who cross the border without parents or legal guardians. Some of these children have been detained again and returned to ORR shelters. In such cases, their relatives or guardians have been required to prove their relationship to the child all over again. “They are told that the same person has to provide evidence and go through a lot of procedures to get them back, even though they had already been approved as sponsors,” Sendukas explains.Among its clients, GHIRP has also represented minors fined for entering the country at unauthorized border points or for lacking legal status. They are told they have 30 days to appeal the penalty. The measure stems from a provision in the sweeping tax law signed by Trump in July 2025, which imposes a $5,000 fine on any foreign national apprehended at the border. The fine, levied by Border Patrol, has been reported by attorneys representing children in federal custody in Michigan, New York and Texas since at least September 2025.“They have no money. They have no way to pay a fine to the U.S. government. Most don’t even know what it is. They have no idea that this paperwork is in their file. It’s us or the shelter social workers who say, ‘We found this in the child’s file,’” Sendukas says. The lawyer says that in most cases, appeals against the fines have been denied.She also says there is a group of minors who are detained more often by immigration agents: teenagers who were already living in the United States but who were separated from their families and therefore do not fall under the category of unaccompanied minors.“They’re pulled from their schools, from their communities and sent to these ORR facilities. Often their families don’t know what happened to them, it takes days to find them again and, once they find out where they are, they have to provide a lot of paperwork, evidence, go through background checks, give fingerprints, DNA tests to prove they are the caregivers, when they already lived with them and were under their care because they are their biological parents,” Sendukas explains. One of the cases GHIRP is handling involves a girl who was handing out flyers with her stepfather. Both were detained, and her mother has now spent more than 200 days trying to regain custody of her daughter.EL PAÍS reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services and the ORR about the conditions of children in their custody and how they will provide legal assistance once these contracts end. Neither agency responded.For fiscal year 2025, ORR reports on its website that it received 22,833 unaccompanied minors referred by the Department of Homeland Security. During that period, the average stay in federal custody was 117 days, more than three times longer than the previous year. Sendukas says her organization has had to file habeas corpus petitions to secure the release of children who had spent more than 300 days in ORR custody. Aber puts the figure as high as 500 days and says that in the past, even during Trump’s first administration, detention periods did not exceed 70 days.The GHIRP attorney says they have seen children arrive feeling hopeful, only to develop such profound anxiety, depression and hopelessness over time that they begin considering abandoning their cases.Shaina agrees with Sendukas: “The mental health of these children is deteriorating. Under a coercive environment, they are being asked to make decisions that can have life-altering consequences.”The worst-case scenarioThe federal government owes $65 million to the organizations that provide pro bono legal representation to unaccompanied minors, a sum that is difficult to raise independently. The release of those funds is being challenged in court, but no ruling is expected before Friday. As a result, the organizations involved in the litigation have spent months searching for alternative sources of funding to keep operating.One of those organizations is Estrella del Paso, a nonprofit based in the border city of El Paso, Texas. Its executive director, Melissa López, says the group stopped accepting new cases on July 17. It currently represents 250 unaccompanied minors. For now, the organization has been operating week to week, using reserve funds to cover salaries and day-to-day expenses. It is seeking additional funding to keep its services running for at least a few more months. The federal government owes the organization nearly $1 million.“It has taken us 20 years to learn how to talk to children so they feel comfortable even if they have experienced trauma,” she says. “The loss of funding means not only a loss of services for children, but also the loss of an enormous amount of highly specialized expertise in this area of law.”GHIRP is in a similar situation: the federal government owes them more than $1 million. Sendukas says that although they are seeking independent funds, it is almost impossible to find a donor who can cover such a large shortfall: “We will do what we can to stay in the fight and by our clients’ side.”She regrets that organizations’ operational capacity is being weakened at a time when immigration authorities are accelerating proceedings, including asylum cases. Next month, precisely when federal funding will have run out, authorities have scheduled 35 asylum interviews involving the minors her organization represents. According to Sendukas, that amounts to roughly three years’ worth of applications from several attorneys being revived and compressed into a two-week period. Her team will continue to accompany the children through those interviews.Sendukas says she has never witnessed a crackdown of this scale. “It’s a highly coordinated effort, involving multiple agencies, to deprive these children of access to a pro bono lawyer, to strip them of the due process rights the law grants them and to push them into the deportation machinery,” she says. “It’s a process that almost guarantees these children will end up with an order of deportation.”Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition