Elder Chavez arrived in the United States alone at 14, fleeing Honduras after his parents abandoned him. He received Special Immigrant Juvenile status – a legal protection designed for children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned. Elder built his life here. Earlier this year, a traffic stop sent him to a detention center in Louisiana, where an immigration officer looked at his legal paperwork and said: “Your papers are of no use to me.” Elder is now on a path to deportation.
As Pro Publica reported this month, he is not alone. Deportations of people who arrived as unaccompanied children have tripled under this administration, with courts issuing more than 10,000 removal orders a month. Officials are placing unaccompanied children on “rocket dockets” that fast-track court dates with so little notice that many cannot find a lawyer. Even represented children face extremely rushed hearings. The organization I lead, Ayuda, is managing over 50 hearings in the next month alone. By forcing these impossible timelines, this policy prioritizes speed over children’s rights to a fair hearing.
Ayuda has been a part of a network of legal service providers under a federally funded government contract through the Acacia Center for Justice that ensures children have access to the representation they deserve. On July 31, that contract expires, and the government has no plan in place for continuing this vital work. At Ayuda, we are currently representing 263 of these kids across the country; this would impact more than 20,000 immigrant children. We believe this is an intentional process that effectively denies these children their fundamental right to due process and a fair hearing.
On top of this, for the past five months, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has withheld congressionally approved funding from Acacia’s entire network of legal service providers for services already provided to unaccompanied children. HHS refuses to reimburse Acacia, and in turn, Ayuda, unless we betray clients’ confidences and turn over confidential or privileged information. In the hands of an administration working to deport these children en masse, that information would function as a roadmap to do exactly that.
We know what follows because we have already seen the dress rehearsal. Over Labor Day weekend last year, ICE contractors woke children in the middle of the night, loaded them onto buses, and tried to fly them out of the country on a holiday weekend. They gave our network 15 minutes’ advance warning to notify their attorneys. A federal judge, also awakened in the middle of the night, stopped the effort as the plane was taxiing on the runway.
The administration is reportedly already in talks with the state of Texas – which has no expertise with children’s immigration cases – about taking over legal services for these children after the contract ends. Repatriation organizations in Central America have been told to prepare for a surge of returning children by the same date.
At the same time, the Trump administration is building a 528-bed staging facility next to Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, the nation’s busiest hub for ICE deportation flights. The facility is designed to hold migrant families and children just long enough to put them on a plane. Officials describe it as a place for “self-deporting” families. We should call it what it is: a deportation conveyor belt built to move vulnerable children out of the country quickly.
The new Louisiana facility opens in August. Our contract ends July 31. The timing is not an accident.
Lawyers are the last line of defense standing between these children and wrongful deportation. Without a lawyer, a child wins their case less than 10 percent of the time. Studies show immigration judges are nearly 100 times less likely to grant relief to an unrepresented child.
I have worked in this field long enough to know what those numbers mean in practice. They mean a 16-year-old girl, trafficked by her own family starting at age six, who came to this country to keep her one-year-old son from the same fate – getting put on a plane and sent back to the people who sold her. They mean children who survived things most adults could not imagine, losing the one person in their corner, standing alone in a courtroom and facing a trained government attorney arguing for their removal.
For nearly two decades, Congress has funded legal representation for unaccompanied children. It was not a partisan issue. It was a recognition that children should not face the full machinery of the United States government alone. This administration has decided to abandon that commitment to children’s legal rights.
But we’re holding the administration to it. It must act now. Pay what is owed to legal service providers. Honor the work Congress already funded. Offer full transparency about its plans after July 31 for the unaccompanied children that have been released, those in federal custody, and those currently represented.
These children came here with nothing but hope. The decisions made over the next two weeks will determine whether they have a lawyer standing beside them – or face deportation alone.
