Every Democrat in the Texas congressional delegation is pressing federal health officials for clarity after learning that Trump administration officials reached out to a state legal-aid agency about representing immigrant children headed to deportation hearings. The lawmakers say the ask, combined with other shifts in how the government houses these kids, hints at a broader plan to funnel unaccompanied minors into Texas so they can be removed more quickly.
According to Texas Tribune reporting, the contact began last month, when aides working for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton first called Scott Ehlers, who runs the Texas Indigent Defense Commission — an agency built to help low-income Texans facing criminal charges, not immigration cases. A Justice Department hearing officer followed up shortly after. Ehlers responded that the work fell outside what state law lets his commission handle. A DOJ spokesperson later told the Tribune that the Office of Refugee Resettlement had actually approached Paxton's office first, which passed the request to Ehlers' commission because it believed it lacked the authority to take on the work itself, and that the department was still reviewing whether such an arrangement would even be lawful.
Congress Weighs In
In a letter dated July 16, Rep. Veronica Escobar and the other twelve Democrats in the Texas delegation told HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and acting ORR Director Angie Salazar that the DOJ contact, combined with a shift in shelter capacity, pointed toward a coordinated effort to relocate children into the state. They warned it could signal what they called "imminent mass removals of vulnerable children."
Following the Beds
The letter and the Tribune's reporting both point to the same underlying shift: shelter space for unaccompanied children has been drying up in several Democratic-led states even as capacity in Texas holds firm. Reporting from New York Focus found the government shut down at least 50 federally funded shelters in New York, Illinois, and Michigan this spring — cutting New York's bed count roughly in half — while contractors in Texas were simultaneously posting hundreds of shelter job openings. Nationally, the population of children physically inside ORR shelters has dropped sharply, from close to 7,000 at the close of 2024 down to fewer than 2,000 now.
Meanwhile, a much larger population — more than 20,000 children with open immigration cases and who have been transferred to sponsors — continues to rely on the Acacia Center for Justice for legal representation. That federal contract lapses July 31, and the government hasn't spelled out what happens to those cases afterward. Separately, advocates noticed this month that ORR's own online policy manual covering the mandated notice period before transferring a child went dark, listing "restricted access" — a change the agency hasn't explained.
Echoes of a Failed Overnight Operation
This wouldn't be the government's first attempt at a rapid removal. Over Labor Day weekend in 2025, contractors roused dozens of Guatemalan children from their beds before dawn and loaded them onto planes waiting at Valley International Airport in Harlingen; a federal judge intervened before the aircraft could take off, according to contemporaneous reporting from The New York Times. Marion "Mickey" Donovan-Kaloust of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, who is involved in the ongoing litigation from that episode, told the Tribune, "We've seen this pattern before," describing any renewed push into Texas as a continuation of the same strategy.
Legal-Aid Groups Say They're Owed Money
Adding to the tension is money advocates say the government still owes them. Escobar's letter states that Estrella del Paso, a legal-aid nonprofit that has served the El Paso community for four decades, is owed close to $765,000 and could be forced to close. Earlier this month, Kids In Need of Defense — the organization Angelina Jolie helped establish — cut ties with its Acacia subcontract, saying the government had failed to pay more than $20 million owed since December. KIND's president, Wendy Young, said in the group's statement that its attorneys are "these children's most critical line of defense against trafficking." Separately, Sen. Ron Wyden has said the administration is relying on an untested legal theory to speed the removal of more than 500 children already in its custody — telling the Tribune the arrangement amounts to "the Trump deportation agenda being executed by a political ally."
Why Texas Specifically Worries Advocates
Texas and Florida stopped licensing and inspecting the childcare facilities that house immigrant children after Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order ending that oversight in 2021. Rochelle Garza of the Texas Civil Rights Project argues the state isn't equipped to handle this responsibility humanely. Jonathan White, who served as ORR's deputy director during Trump's first term, described the broader effort as consolidating child-welfare functions into Texas through what he called "a friendly political partnership with the governor's office there" — closer to the border and, critics argue, to federal courts that have generally sided with the administration on immigration matters.
A Response That Doesn't Quite Answer the Question
For weeks, HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard has said only that the department is pursuing every possible option to secure legal help for children, without confirming or denying any plan to move minors to Texas. That line held even after Escobar's letter went out: an HHS official told Border Report this week that under federal trafficking-prevention law, ORR "seeks to avoid unnecessary delays" in children's cases — language that echoes the earlier statement without engaging any of the delegation's four specific questions.
The Texas delegation has given Washington until July 23 to say whether relocations are planned, what happens to pending cases once the Acacia contract ends, and when overdue payments will finally go out. As of this writing, spokespeople for Paxton and Abbott still haven't responded to detailed questions about the state's role.
