Starting this week, thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States have lost legal representation, leaving them without an attorney and unable to present their cases in immigration court rightfully. 

This happened after a federal contract that funded immigrant children’s access to lawyers expired last Friday, July 31, 2026. 

The former contract was held by Acacia Center for Justice, a nationwide network of nearly 100 legal service providers offering legal services for immigrants at risk of detention or deportation. 

Acacia Center for Justice managed the legal services contract with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the department where unaccompanied children are typically transferred to. 

Contract Expiration

Acacia Center for Justice became the prime contract holder for the ORR’s Unaccompanied Children Program in 2023. The Vera Institute of Justice previously held the five-year contract, with Acacia Center for Justice as the implementing program administration partner.

Apart from not obtaining a contract renewal, Acacia Center for Justice said they have not been paid for representation or court assistance work since last December. 

According to the organization, the federal government has intended to disrupt their work since February 2025, after they declined to provide ORR with requested information about children. Attorneys, both at a local and national level, have argued that this is confidential information protected through attorney-client confidentiality. 

“For months, Acacia has been negotiating in good faith with the government to find a way to continue representing unaccompanied children who would be left without their trusted lawyers and at the whims of an administration that seems intent on finding ways to target and deport them as quickly as possible,” the organization said in a statement. “The government is withholding payment for work that has already been performed in order to extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to.”

Kids representing themselves

Local organizations, including the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), which currently represents over 1,500 unaccompanied children, say the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle legal representation for children come at a time when underage kids already navigate complex immigration proceedings. 

Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of ImmDef, said this is another example of the country’s inability to safeguard children.  

“At a moment when the public is demanding answers and accountability about the government's handling of the Epstein files and its failures to protect children from exploitation and abuse, this administration is choosing to take legal protections away from vulnerable children who need them most,” she said. “The Trump administration wants immigration courts to be a place where children lose. That's the only explanation for taking lawyers away from kids who have already survived violence, trafficking and abuse.”

ImmDef said many of the children they work with are often too young to read legal documents, speak for themselves in court or understand the proceedings determining their future. Apart from this, many of these children, the majority of whom are Latinos, do not speak or understand English.

“The [Trump] administration is blatantly violating a federal court order meant to ensure that unaccompanied children have the legal counsel they need to protect their rights under laws passed by Congress almost 20 years ago,” said Alvaro M. Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at ImmDef. 

Local and national demands continue

Last week, Defending Our Neighbors, a national initiative created by United We Dream and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), hosted a press briefing denouncing the ending of legal representation for thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children. The initiative said the end of legal representation can lead to a mass deportation of children in the next few months.

Mayra Peters-Quintero, executive director at Abundant Futures Fund and co-lead at Defending Our Neighbors Fund, said funding to support several frontline legal services is essential to children's well-being. “Justice shouldn’t have a price tag. It should be available to anyone, regardless of age or income,” she said.

Since the withholding of payments to Acacia Center for Justice, the Defending Our Neighbors Fund provided emergency funding to support and continue legal services, but the organization said that without immediate federal action to renew the federal contract, thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children will be forced to self-represent against trained government attorneys. 

“We launched the Defending Our Neighbors Fund because we understood that the American public, regardless of political orientation, agrees on this basic principle,” Peters-Quintero said. “Yet countless children—even as young as babies—must face trained prosecutors without a lawyer by their side and the crisis is about to get much worse.”

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an average of roughly 100,000 to over 130,000 unaccompanied minors are encountered at the U.S. border annually, with numbers varying widely by year based on changing migration patterns. 

On Saturday, NPR reported that Acacia Center for Justice had received notice from the federal government that ORR was considering a new contract potentially with different legal providers.

As of now, ORR has not given any additional information about the contract or the chance of renewal.

“We are proud of the legal teams who have continued to show up and defend the rights of more than 20,000 children despite not being paid for representation or court assistance work we were funded to do since December of 2025,” the Acacia Center for Justice stated.