20,000 Migrant Children Lost Their Lawyers Overnight as a Federal Contract Ran Out

The federal contract that pays for lawyers to represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court expired Friday, July 31, leaving more than 20,000 minors — some of them toddlers — facing deportation proceedings with no attorney and no clear replacement in sight.

The contract has been held since December 2023 by the Acacia Center for Justice, which distributes the money to more than 100 nonprofit legal organizations across the country. Those subcontractors are the ones who actually sit next to a 7-year-old in front of an immigration judge. Several of them say they have been operating on fumes for months: the Department of Health and Human Services has withheld roughly $65 million in payments for work already performed, with unpaid invoices stretching back to December.

HHS and Acacia give sharply different accounts of why the money stopped. The department's Office of Refugee Resettlement says it offered Acacia a new contract on terms that include turning over client-level data on which children are being represented and billing the government at the point applications for immigration relief are submitted. Acacia's executive director says those terms are impossible to accept: "They continue to insist that the only way that they will pay for the work already completed for the representation of children is if we betray our legal ethics and the confidences of children who we are representing." Attorney-client privilege, the providers argue, is not a bargaining chip the government gets to demand in exchange for invoices it already owes.

The damage is already visible at the organizations that do the work. Kids in Need of Defense says it is owed more than $25 million and has burned through its reserves. Estrella del Paso, a Texas provider that has operated for 40 years, is facing closure over $765,000 in unpaid federal funds and has stopped taking new clients. In New York alone, roughly 1,400 unaccompanied children are affected. Representatives Summer Lee and Chris Deluzio have raised alarms about hundreds of children in Pennsylvania losing counsel, and legal aid groups in Connecticut have warned that children in federal custody in the state may go unrepresented within days.

Legal service providers have filed emergency motions asking a federal court to force the government to resume payments, and a judge has scheduled a hearing for August 6. Until then, the practical question is who shows up. Immigration court is adversarial: a government attorney argues for removal, and there is no public defender system for immigration cases, including for children. Studies of outcomes have repeatedly found that represented children are far more likely to be allowed to stay than unrepresented ones, and providers put the consequence of Friday's expiration in a single sentence — without attorneys, children will be deported.

This is not the first attempt to end the program. The administration moved to cut the same funding stream in early 2025, was ordered by a federal judge to restore it, and was accused by providers of slow-walking compliance. What is different now is the mechanism. Rather than cancelling the contract outright, the government has let it lapse while holding back money for work already done — a squeeze that does not require a court to bless it and that has already pushed some 40-year-old nonprofits to the edge of shutting down.