Unaccompanied migrant children at risk of losing legal representation

Amna Nawaz:

Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could lose legal representation as soon as today now that a federal contract with legal aid groups representing the miners is expiring.

Our justice correspondent, Ali Rogin, has more on what happens next.

Ali Rogin:

Amna, that contract held by the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice has funded legal services for unaccompanied children for the last five years. But Acacia claims the Trump administration stopped making those payments late last year and so far has withheld $65 million owed.

That's forced legal groups across the country to lay off staff and take fewer new cases. It comes as the Trump administration has pressed legal services providers to give up information about their clients.

For more, I'm joined by Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice.

Shaina, thank you so much for being with us.

Shaina Aber, Acacia Center for Justice: It's a pleasure to be here, although I wish it was under different circumstances.

Ali Rogin:

First, can you tell us about when and why this program started and the services that it provides?

Shaina Aber:

Sure.

The commitment to provide children with legal access, legal representation, and for them to have their needs assessed and have their options understood began in 2005. There was a pilot program that kicked off in that time period.

And then, by 2008, there was a bipartisan, I think it was a unanimous Congress that sought to memorialize this commitment to unaccompanied children, in particular to break cyclical trafficking risks that they were seeing, as children would be trafficked over the border, sent back to their traffickers and trafficked back over the border, really to give children ability to have their cases heard, have their rights understood, and to explore what legal options they had available.

Ali Rogin:

How many minors are you and the organizations you work with currently representing, and what do their age ranges tend to be?

Shaina Aber:

So we're representing over 20,000 children around the country. Those are children that are both within immigration custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which sits in HHS, and children who have been released from that custody and are living in communities, going through their court proceedings, and going to school along with our kids.

They raise in age from toddlers to teens. And what I can tell you about every single one of these kids is, they're kids just like our kids. And, fundamentally, this is not about a contract. It's not about politics. It's about children and children's ability to understand their rights and have their voices heard.

Ali Rogin:

These children, though, of course, do depend on this contract for that representation. So what can you tell us about why this contract is not being renewed?

Shaina Aber:

It really comes down to, first of all, the government has wanted to strip children of legal representation since about day one of this administration. They attempted to cancel the contract in February of 2025.

And then again in March, they dismantled kids' specific dockets where judges were trained in trauma-informed adjudication techniques. So there's been a priority by this administration on dismantling children's legal rights, and our sense is that this is the culmination of that goal.

Ali Rogin:

And we have reached out to HHS for comment. They have not yet responded to us.

But I know that they have been asking for some information. Can you tell us about what they have been asking for and what Acacia's response has been?

Shaina Aber:

In late April, early May, they demanded a whole slew of information, including details about children's cases.

Now, we provide the government with monthly reports, lots of data. Ad hoc requests, we are -- we provide on a regular basis. But we can't actually betray children's confidences. That is something that is a foundational principle of our legal system that there's attorney-client privilege.

And the kinds of information that they were asking for, including unredacting information where we had -- we had kept children's identities private, is a completely novel request and isn't in our contract and would breach our ethical obligations to children.

Ali Rogin:

And what happens when this contract expires? Are these children going to lose access to counsel immediately?

Shaina Aber:

I mean, I think that some will. We -- the fact is, we don't know what the government's plan is, and they have -- the secrecy is part of the problem.

We're trying to counsel children around the country right now on what their best options are, on who's going to represent them tomorrow. These are kids who have been failed by multiple adults in their lives. And when I think about these kids waking up in their beds tomorrow and having no sense that they still have an adult who understands the system fighting in their corner, it breaks my heart.

I think it will read to those kids who've already been failed by so many adults as a breach, just another breach of their trust.

Ali Rogin:

Shaina Aber with the Acacia Center for Justice, thank you so much for joining us.

Shaina Aber:

Thanks for having me.