Federal funding cuts have gutted legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children, unraveling a bipartisan safeguard that has stood for decades.
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Last week, I appeared alongside Shaina Aber, Acacia Center for Justice’s Executive Director, Ana Devereaux, Senior Managing Attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, and Katie, a member of Women of Welcome who has fostered many unaccompanied children, for a press conference. During the press conference, we attempted to put into perspective the magnitude of the Trump administrations decision to cut funding to Acacia Center for Justice, the main coordinator of services to children in the Immigration Court system. Shaina summed up the moment we are in precisely when she stated that the immigration system is now made up of a number of separate pieces, any one of which alone would be devastating, but which taken together are catastrophic. The impacts of this decision hit home pretty hard last Friday when I got an email announcing the closing of the Nashville and Memphis offices of the Mid-South Immigration Advocates, an organization that has worked tirelessly for children and families across Tennessee, Mississippi, and my home state of Arkansas for thirteen years. Although many of the network of funded organizations have been able to endure the past eight months on reserves and foundation funding to bridge this gap, not all have. These small, local organizations are no longer able to ethically represent these kids without having a guarantee of funding.
The history of this funding underscores its importance. Under a bipartisan agreement during the Bush administration, Congress first began funding legal services for unaccompanied children immigrants, recognizing that children should not be required to navigate the court system on their own.
It bears noting that the origins of this funding, both the Homeland Security Act of 2003 and subsequent appropriations bill, as well as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (“TVPRA”) of 2008, passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority. The TVPRA passed unanimously. Think about that – less than 20 years ago, our Congress made a unanimous decision to ensure “to the greatest extent practicable,” that every unaccompanied child in immigration proceedings has access to counsel. It seemed a fairly obvious choice: a child’s case cannot be adjudicated fairly if the child cannot understand, let alone navigate, the proceeding.
What began as a pilot project administered by the Vera Institute of Justice grew, over five presidential administrations of both major political parties, into a nationwide network of legal service providers. In recent years, that work has been consolidated under a federal contract with the Acacia Center for Justice, which coordinates more than one hundred organizations to provide “Know Your Rights” presentations, legal screenings, and direct representation to tens of thousands of children. The results of that investment are not abstract. Without a lawyer, children win the right to remain in the United States less than ten percent of the time. With one, immigration judges are dramatically more likely to grant relief. This program has enjoyed bipartisan support since the George W. Bush administration, through the Obama administration, both Trump administrations and the Biden administration, precisely because no one seriously disputes that a five-year-old cannot cross-examine a witness or brief a legal standard.
That is the backdrop against which the current moment has to be understood. Acacia Center for Justice currently holds this contract, managing a nationwide network of small legal aid subcontractors whose sole purpose is to work with juveniles in the immigration system. On Friday, July 31, the official contract to fund these legal services for children in the Immigration Court system officially ends. Of course, it has effectively been lost since November 2025, when the Department Health and Human Services indefinitely delayed reimbursement for the contract. Rather than renew it, the administration has spent months withholding roughly $65 million in payments already owed to providers for work already performed, dating back to November 2025. Reporting also indicates that HHS has sought to condition release of the overdue funds on Acacia turning over attorney-client privileged information about its child clients, which the organization's own lawyers say they cannot lawfully do.
Instead of renewing the contract with the network of organizations that has done this work for twenty years, the federal government approached the Texas Attorney General’s office to take it over. When that office concluded it lacked authority to do so, it recommended routing the money instead to the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, a state body created to help Texas counties fund criminal defense for indigent defendants, with no history in immigration law and, by its own account and that of state lawmakers, real doubt about whether it is even legally authorized to take on this work. Whatever this arrangement turns out to be, it is not a lateral transfer of an existing program. It is the quiet dismantling of one, dressed up as a transfer, with an effective date of August 1 if nothing changes before then.
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