HHS Is Handing a Houston Firm With No Immigration Lawyers Up to $150 Million to Represent 20,000 Migrant Children
Burke Law Group lists immigration among two dozen practice areas but has no staff specializing in it. The contract starts Aug. 15, two weeks after the previous provider's deal expired unrenewed.
The Department of Health and Human Services has announced its intent to award a contract worth up to $150 million a year to Burke Law Group, a boutique firm headquartered in Houston, to provide legal representation to more than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody. The contract takes effect Aug. 15 and runs one year.
Burke Law Group does not employ anyone who specializes in immigration law. The firm's website lists immigration and asylum among roughly two dozen practice areas, alongside energy regulation, environmental permitting and commercial litigation. Nothing in its public roster indicates experience running a national legal-services network, which is what the contract requires: legal orientation, legal consultation and attorney-of-record representation for children in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, in immigration court and in proceedings before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The firm's founder and managing partner, Marcella Burke, served as deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency and at the Department of the Interior during President Donald Trump's first term. She sits on the board of the Federalist Society's Houston Lawyers Chapter and was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott to the Texas School Land Board.
The award follows the collapse of the previous arrangement. Since December 2023, the Acacia Center for Justice held the prime contract with HHS for the Unaccompanied Children Program, coordinating subcontracts with more than 100 nonprofit legal-services providers across the country. Acacia's contract expired Aug. 1 and was not renewed. Providers in that network say the government has withheld roughly $65 million in overdue invoices dating back to December, and several have sued to recover the money.
The gap left about 20,000 children — the population Acacia's network had been defending — without assigned counsel at the start of August. Federal law has required the government to facilitate access to legal counsel for unaccompanied children in ORR custody since 2008, when the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act was signed. The statute obligates HHS to make counsel available "to the greatest extent practicable," a phrase the department has interpreted differently across administrations.
Whether a Houston firm with no immigration specialists can stand up nationwide representation for tens of thousands of children in ten days is the practical question. The children are dispersed across shelters and foster placements in dozens of states, and their cases run in immigration courts from New York to San Diego. Building that footprint is what took Acacia's network years and more than 100 subcontractors.
HHS has not said publicly how Burke Law Group will staff the work, whether it intends to subcontract to the same nonprofits whose invoices remain unpaid, or how the department scored the firm's qualifications against competing bids.
Originally reported by NOTUS.