On Aug. 18, a girl barely a year old sat before an immigration judge in Arizona with no attorney at her side. The judge's instruction was blunt: submit a completed asylum application ahead of her next scheduled date, or face removal from the country. A lawyer from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants sat in on the hearing remotely but said nothing, according to a federal court motion made public two days later.
Three Children, Three Courtrooms, Three Weeks
The Arizona baby is not an isolated case. She is the third documented instance in three weeks of a migrant child facing an immigration judge essentially alone. On Aug. 6, in a Los Angeles courtroom, an unaccompanied child asked the judge for voluntary departure — agreeing to give up any claim to stay and go home on their own — as a USCRI lawyer looked on without objecting; the child was only spared because a different, unpaid attorney spoke up as a friend of the court and won a continuance, court records show. Five days later, in Texas, a 7-year-old had far worse luck: no lawyer of any kind showed up, and the child was granted voluntary departure — giving up any shot at asylum or other relief — without ever speaking to an attorney.
Attorneys for the nonprofits suing the government over the collapse argued in their filing that it was "facially absurd to ask an unrepresented baby to do anything," saying the silent USCRI lawyer should have objected on the spot.
How the Safety Net Came Apart
The breakdown traces back to July 31, when the government let its main contract for children's immigration legal aid expire. That funding pipeline stretches back to a 2005 pilot project built around the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which obligates Washington to guarantee counsel for unaccompanied minors "to the greatest extent practicable." The contract had most recently been run by the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, which stepped in as the government's prime contractor after taking over from the Vera Institute of Justice in December 2023, funneling money to nearly 100 legal aid groups nationwide.
The Trump administration allowed that contract to die after Acacia refused to hand over confidential case files on the children it represented, arguing the request would breach attorney-client privilege. The standoff left Washington owing the network more than $65 million for already-billed work — money a federal judge ordered released on Aug. 6 after finding the administration had defied its own prior order; the payment reportedly reached the nonprofits within days. But the money fight was never really the point. Without a lawyer, fewer than one in ten migrant children succeed in winning permission to stay in the country, and Acacia's executive director Shaina Aber said "the secrecy is a big part of the problem."
The Replacements Raise New Alarms
In the days after Acacia's contract expired, the government scrambled to patch the gap, and each patch invited fresh scrutiny. Starting Aug. 5, USCRI began covering hearings under a roughly $20 million bridge deal that runs only through year's end and, according to the plaintiffs' filing, spans just 19 immigration court locations nationwide with 57 staff — appearing not as children's attorneys but as unpaid friends of the court, a role with no power to file motions or object on a child's behalf.
A second no-bid deal, worth up to $150 million, was floated for a modest law firm in Houston, Burke Law Group, whose own attorney roster showed almost no immigration-law background; the firm publicly denied it had ever applied for the grant and walked away within a week. The government then turned to Our Rescue, an anti-trafficking nonprofit that landed a deal worth $158 million, with a ceiling of $244 million, despite never having held a federal legal-services contract before. Our Rescue was founded by Tim Ballard, the activist portrayed in the film "Sound of Freedom," who stepped down from the group's predecessor organization in 2023 after employees accused him of misconduct he denies; the nonprofit is now led by Derek Benner, a former Homeland Security Investigations official, who defended the award by saying migrant children "deserve nothing less than the full weight of our experience." Advocates for the displaced legal aid groups say Our Rescue has no track record representing children in immigration proceedings.
A Judge Presses for Answers
The dispute is playing out inside Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto v. HHS, a lawsuit nonprofits filed in March 2025 to block the funding cutoff. After the Aug. 6 order, government lawyers reported to the court on Aug. 13 that USCRI was providing full coverage of hearings nationwide — a claim the plaintiffs dispute point by point in an Aug. 20 motion asking the court to hold an evidentiary hearing, arguing USCRI attorneys have shown up late, left early, or never formally entered an appearance for any child. A hearing is now scheduled for Sept. 24.
What's at Stake for Latino Families
Most unaccompanied children arriving at the border still come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, along with a growing share from Mexico. Many are eventually released to relatives already living in the U.S., often in cities with sizable Latino communities such as Houston, Los Angeles and South Florida — places where a botched or missed asylum filing can upend an extended family's plans years in the making. Immigration attorneys say the youngest children, who cannot speak for themselves in any language, are the ones most likely to fall through the cracks of a system that increasingly expects them to navigate it alone.
The specific $65 million payment dispute has been resolved. The deeper question — whether any of the government's replacement contractors will actually put a lawyer beside a child in court — remains before the judge overseeing the case, with the next hearing five weeks away.
