Imagine a child — sometimes too young to even talk — sitting alone in a courtroom, facing a trained government lawyer whose job is to get them deported. No parent. No attorney. Just a kid.

That's the situation the Trump administration is now creating on purpose. Immigration attorneys warned this week that as many as 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children are at risk of losing their lawyers — because the administration is sitting on money Congress already approved to pay for them.

Holding kids' lawyers hostage

Here's what happened. Congress set aside $65 million to pay for legal representation for unaccompanied children in immigration court. It's not a handout the administration gets to cancel on a whim — it's money lawmakers appropriated, for a program Congress created.

But for more than six months, the Health and Human Services Department's Office of Refugee Resettlement has refused to release it. Legal groups haven't been reimbursed since December. Some have already had to walk away from the work because they can't afford to keep going unpaid.

Why is the money being held back? According to Shaina Aber, who runs the Acacia Center for Justice — a group that works with about 100 legal organizations — the administration withheld the funds because the attorneys refused to hand over sensitive information about their young clients, including medical records and the specific legal relief the kids were seeking.

"These children should not, and should never be, leveraged in a political game," Aber said.

Think about what that means: the government is demanding private, attorney-client information about children, and holding their lawyers' pay hostage until it gets it.

Without a lawyer, kids lose

This isn't a small technical fight. It decides whether a child gets a fair shot.

Elizabeth Young, a former immigration judge, laid out the stakes plainly: without a lawyer, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to stay in the United States while their case moves through court. With one, their odds go up dramatically.

And some of these children are toddlers. "Some children going through the courts are too young to speak," Young said. "A legal system that values fairness cannot expect children to carry that burden alone."

Ana Devereaux of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center said her group is now running on reserves just to keep representing about 1,100 children. She summed up the whole thing in four words: "Children are children, regardless of their nationality."

Already breaking a court order

This is where it gets worse. A court already told the administration to keep funding these legal services.

Last year, a federal judge issued an injunction ordering the government to continue paying for legal aid for unaccompanied children. The administration has ignored it — advocates say they've received no funds since December. This month, 11 legal groups went back to court asking Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín to hold the administration in contempt for defying her order.

On top of that, the administration doesn't plan to renew its contract with Acacia when it ends July 31. Instead, it's reportedly looking to hand the work to a small Texas commission that handles criminal defense for low-income adults — a group with no experience representing immigrant children.

What this really is

More than 70 members of Congress have demanded the administration release the money, warning the delays look like an attempt to "circumvent" the law. As Aber put it, stripping legal help from these kids is "yet another system of mass deportations."

That's the honest way to describe it. When you can't win a policy fight in Congress — Congress funded these lawyers, after all — you starve the program instead. You hold the money, ignore the judge, and let the clock run out. The people who pay the price are children standing alone in a courtroom, expected to argue their own case against a professional whose goal is to send them away.

A country that does that to kids isn't enforcing the law. It's abandoning them.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Ariana Figueroa for States Newsroom, published in the Ohio Capital Journal, with additional reporting from El Paso Matters.