The Trump administration is stripping funding for legal representation from tens of thousands of children who are unaccompanied migrants in the United States, a move immigration lawyers warn violates their legal rights and will leave minors vulnerable to abuse.
“Picture yourself thrown into a detention center in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, where you don’t understand that country’s complex legal system, only to be told that now you must fend for yourself, assert your rights and seek whatever protections that country might offer you,” Jennie Giambastiani, a retired immigration judge, said Tuesday during a call organized by the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.
“Now picture yourself as a child in that situation,” she added.
Government-funded attorneys changed that dynamic, Giambastiani said, because they worked hard “to make sure that the children understood the proceedings and could present their claims in court.” Most unaccompanied children can’t afford to hire their own legal representation.
Without those lawyers, Giambastiani said separately, the immigration courts would be thrown into “chaos”: “The judge won’t have any sense that this child understands why [they’re] there in court.”
The Trump administration has decided to cancel $200 million in annual funding for legal representation for unaccompanied minors, ABC News first reported Friday, citing an internal Trump administration memo. The New York Times matched that report.
According to ABC, the cut ended funding for the recruitment of attorneys to represent migrant children, though it did not cut informational presentations for children that are delivered in detention centers. Notably, the administration had previously issued a stop-work order concerning the same services last month but reversed it a few days later.
Now, the legal representation funding is apparently being slashed altogether.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement is housed within the Department of Health and Human Services and is responsible for overseeing the care of unaccompanied migrant children, including in contracted shelters.
The federal webpage for the contract now shows that it was “terminated for convenience” on Friday. And the Acacia Center for Justice, which runs the Unaccompanied Children Program that provides the legal services in question — and which serves 26,000 children through a network of organizations — confirmed the cut in a statement Friday.
“The administration’s decision to partially terminate this program flies in the face of decades of work and bipartisan cooperation spent ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests,” the group said.
By Monday, over 100 organizations involved in Acacia’s Unaccompanied Children Program signed onto a statement opposing the cut.
“Abandoning [children] while fast-tracking their deportation cases will lead to mass due process violations and wrongful denials of protection,” Christine Lin, director of training and technical assistance at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, said in the statement.
“In cases with life-or-death stakes, this will mean children being deported to countries where they face grave harm. We urge the administration to reverse this decision and immediately restore legal services for unaccompanied children.”
“This brazen, heartless act endangers children’s lives,” said Ashley Harrington, managing attorney of the children’s program at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, or RMIAN.
“RMIAN represents child survivors of trafficking, abuse and trauma, including children as young as 2 years old,” Harrington said. “Children cannot be expected to navigate the harsh and complicated immigration legal system without an attorney. This administration wants to force us to abandon them to face ICE and the immigration courts alone. But we will continue to stand in solidarity with these children and fight to protect their rights to legal representation.”
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the government to provide legal representation for minors to the “greatest extent practicable,” the Times noted. The paper cited American Immigration Council data showing that children appear in immigration court 95% of the time when represented by an attorney, as opposed to 33% of the time without one. Funding for the legal representation for unaccompanied minors had been continuously renewed since 2005, El Pais noted.
“HHS continues to meet the legal requirements established by TVPRA and Flores,” HHS deputy press secretary Emily G. Hilliard told HuffPost in an email, referring to the Flores Settlement Agreement.
Fifty-seven percent of unaccompanied children with pending immigration cases had legal counsel in 2024, according to the Acacia Center for Justice. And representation makes a major difference: Unaccompanied children with legal representation at some point during their cases were more than seven times as likely to receive an outcome that let them stay in the United States, a 2021 Vera Institute of Justice report found.
The cuts are just one of several steps the Trump administration has taken targeting undocumented youth.
The administration now also allows the Office for Refugee Resettlement to share information about children’s sponsors’ immigration status with law enforcement, Reuters reported — raising concerns that family members could be discouraged from sponsoring relatives due to fears over deportation.
The cuts to legal defense funding for immigrant children are all the more shocking in light of President Donald Trump’s fixation on 325,000 migrant children that he has asserted are “slaves, sex slaves or dead.” The false claim is apparently in reference to a 2024 report that found that 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear for immigration court hearings between fiscal years 2019 and 2023; the same report counted 291,000 children to whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not yet served notices to appear for court dates.
Setting aside that the time period covered both the Trump and Biden administrations, these children were not presumed “lost,” let alone trafficked. Rather, those figures represent more of a “paperwork issue,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told the BBC in November.
“When you hear the phrase ‘missing,’ you think that there is a child that someone is trying to find and can’t,” he said. “That’s not the case here. The government has not made any effort to find these children.”
Still, migrant children are known to be vulnerable to both sexual abuse and labor exploitation. And the Trump administration’s decision to strip migrant children of their legal representation makes them more susceptible to such harm, advocates say.
“I’ve seen how, without a legal advocate representing their interests, unaccompanied children can really get lost,” Nick Cuneo, a doctor who has worked with unaccompanied children, said on the Amica call.
“Legal representatives are often on the frontline of kids disclosing what’s happening to them,” he added. “As we know, kids without parental figures or close guardians can be subject to predation, and there have been reports of labor trafficking and so forth in the United States with this population in particular that I have seen bear out in anecdotes. Often, attorneys are the ones who are able to pick up on when a child is being mistreated or abused.”
“It’s hard to rationalize any way that makes sense,” Cuneo said, referring to the administration’s decision to remove an “extra layer of protection” for unaccompanied children.
Jesús Güereca, a managing attorney at Estrella del Paso in El Paso, Texas, said on the call that migrant children represented by attorneys “have that trust in us, so they’re able to tell us [about things that are happening to them], and we’re able to do something about that.”
“Inside of a shelter, our primary goal is to keep the children safe,” Güereca said. “That’s what this funding does. It helps keep the children safe. We’re an extra set of eyes, an extra set of ears, an extra set of adults that care about these children.”
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“Without this funding, that’s going away.”