The Trump administration abruptly cut off legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children on Tuesday, telling government-funded attorneys across the country they should immediately stop their work.
Advocates called the decision shocking and warned that taking away legal aid programs would endanger minors already at risk of child trafficking, an issue that Trump and Republican members of his administration repeatedly highlighted as a concern during the 2024 election. The order to “stop all work” affects US non-profits that provide legal counsel for about 26,000 unaccompanied minors.
Tuesday’s sudden “stop-work” orders from the Department of the Interior were confirmed by multiple organizations, including Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), the largest legal service provider to unaccompanied children in southern California, the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, and the Acacia Center for Justice.
“It’s abhorrent,” said Yliana Johansen-Méndez, the chief program officer for (ImmDef). She added that advocates had been expecting some efforts to cut back these services, but were not anticipating such an abrupt and complete stop to all services, including for children who are currently in government custody.
Among ImmDef’s clients are children just a few months oldas well as school-aged, including teenagers. Many are in exceedingly vulnerable situations and have been abused either in their home countries or in the US, or are minors who have been trafficked. For clients who have hearings scheduled for the coming days or weeks, a failure to appear could result in an immediate removal order.
Lindsay Toczylowski, ImmDef’s president and CEO, said the government-funded legal defense efforts were “a 20-year-old program meant to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us”, and that eliminating legal aid for children “will only cause more chaos in our immigration courts and violates our commitment to children’s safety”.
“This decision flies in the face of ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests,” Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, said in a statement.
Despite the stop-work order, which stipulates a complete, immediate and indefinite halt to all legal aid work, ImmDef plans to continue working on behalf of its clients, Johansen-Méndez said. “We have professional obligations to these clients,” she said. “We are required by the oaths that we’ve taken as attorneys by our state bars to not do anything that will prejudice [their cases].”
Among the children affected by this stop-work order are those who presented themselves to officials at the border without their parents and were put under the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR). ImmDef and other legal service non-profits have been acting as subcontracts who provide legal services to minors to see if they can qualify for reprieve from deportations while the ORR searches for family members who can take custody of them.
“These kids who are in government custody, and are not in the care of a family member or adults who can step in for them, they would be going into court with nobody to stand at their side and help,” she said. “And to think that our legal system would be okay with that kind of setup – it’s unbelievable.”
Some of the clients at risk of imminent removal if they are left without legal aid include children who could be sent back to dangerous or abusive environments in their home countries, she added.
Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, the deputy director of the Arizona-based Florence Project, called the move “an unprecedented attack on immigrant children”.
“The US government is officially abandoning thousands of children here in Arizona and across the country to fight their immigration cases alone,” Avila-Cimpeanu said in a statement.
The Trump administration previously issued a similar stop-work order for legal aid programs for adults at risk of deportation, but the justice department restored the funding in early February, two days after non-profits sued the government over the funding cuts, the Associated Press reported.
In the week after the Trump administration issued the stop-work order for adult legal aid, advocates reported confusion and scaling back of services across the country, and staff from at least one advocacy group said they were escorted out of a Virginia detention facility after attempting to continue their legal aid work without funding.
