Trump Cuts Lawyer Funding For Unaccompanied Migrant Kids | EUROtoday

The Trump administration is stripping funding for authorized illustration from tens of hundreds of youngsters who’re unaccompanied migrants within the United States, a transfer immigration legal professionals warn violates their authorized rights and can go away minors susceptible to abuse.

“Picture yourself thrown into a detention center in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, where you don’t understand that country’s complex legal system, only to be told that now you must fend for yourself, assert your rights and seek whatever protections that country might offer you,” Jennie Giambastiani, a retired immigration decide, stated Tuesday throughout a name organized by the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.

“Now picture yourself as a child in that situation,” she added.

Government-funded attorneys modified that dynamic, Giambastiani stated, as a result of they labored arduous “to make sure that the children understood the proceedings and could present their claims in court.” Most unaccompanied youngsters can’t afford to rent their very own authorized illustration.

Without these legal professionals, Giambastiani stated individually, the immigration courts could be thrown into “chaos”: “The judge won’t have any sense that this child understands why [they’re] there in court.”

The Trump administration has determined to cancel $200 million in annual funding for authorized illustration for unaccompanied minors, ABC News first reported Friday, citing an inside Trump administration memo. The New York Times matched that report.

According to ABC, the lower ended funding for the recruitment of attorneys to symbolize migrant youngsters, although it didn’t lower informational displays for kids which might be delivered in detention facilities. Notably, the administration had beforehand issued a stop-work order regarding the identical providers final month however reversed it just a few days later.

Now, the authorized illustration funding is outwardly being slashed altogether.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is housed inside the Department of Health and Human Services and is accountable for overseeing the care of unaccompanied migrant youngsters, together with in contracted shelters.

The federal webpage for the contract now exhibits that it was “terminated for convenience” on Friday. And the Acacia Center for Justice, which runs the Unaccompanied Children Program that gives the authorized providers in query — and which serves 26,000 youngsters via a community of organizations — confirmed the lower in an announcement Friday.

“The administration’s decision to partially terminate this program flies in the face of decades of work and bipartisan cooperation spent ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests,” the group stated.

By Monday, over 100 organizations concerned in Acacia’s Unaccompanied Children Program signed onto an announcement opposing the lower.

“Abandoning [children] while fast-tracking their deportation cases will lead to mass due process violations and wrongful denials of protection,” Christine Lin, director of coaching and technical help on the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, stated within the assertion.

“In cases with life-or-death stakes, this will mean children being deported to countries where they face grave harm. We urge the administration to reverse this decision and immediately restore legal services for unaccompanied children.”

“This brazen, heartless act endangers children’s lives,” stated Ashley Harrington, managing lawyer of the youngsters’s program at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, or RMIAN.

“RMIAN represents child survivors of trafficking, abuse and trauma, including children as young as 2 years old,” Harrington stated. “Children cannot be expected to navigate the harsh and complicated immigration legal system without an attorney. This administration wants to force us to abandon them to face ICE and the immigration courts alone. But we will continue to stand in solidarity with these children and fight to protect their rights to legal representation.”

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the federal government to offer authorized illustration for minors to the “greatest extent practicable,” the Times famous. The paper cited American Immigration Council information exhibiting that youngsters seem in immigration courtroom 95% of the time when represented by an lawyer, versus 33% of the time with out one. Funding for the authorized illustration for unaccompanied minors had been repeatedly renewed since 2005, The nation famous.

“HHS continues to meet the legal requirements established by TVPRA and Flores,” HHS deputy press secretary Emily G. Hilliard instructed HuffPost in an e mail, referring to the Flores Settlement Agreement.

Fifty-seven % of unaccompanied youngsters with pending immigration circumstances had authorized counsel in 2024, based on the Acacia Center for Justice. And illustration makes a serious distinction: Unaccompanied youngsters with authorized illustration sooner or later throughout their circumstances have been greater than seven instances as more likely to obtain an final result that allow them keep within the United States, a 2021 Vera Institute of Justice report discovered.

The cuts are simply one among a number of steps the Trump administration has taken concentrating on undocumented youth.

The administration now additionally permits the Office for Refugee Resettlement to share details about youngsters’s sponsors’ immigration standing with regulation enforcement, Reuters reported — elevating issues that relations could possibly be discouraged from sponsoring kin resulting from fears over deportation.

The cuts to authorized protection funding for immigrant youngsters are all of the extra stunning in mild of President Donald Trump’s fixation on 325,000 migrant youngsters that he has asserted are “slaves, sex slaves or dead.” The false declare is apparently in reference to a 2024 report that discovered that 32,000 unaccompanied migrant youngsters failed to seem for immigration courtroom hearings between fiscal years 2019 and 2023; the identical report counted 291,000 youngsters to whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not but served notices to seem for courtroom dates.

Setting apart that the time interval lined each the Trump and Biden administrations, these youngsters weren’t presumed “lost,” not to mention trafficked. Rather, these figures symbolize extra of a “paperwork issue,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, now a senior fellow on the American Immigration Council, instructed the BBC in November.

“When you hear the phrase ‘missing,’ you think that there is a child that someone is trying to find and can’t,” he stated. “That’s not the case here. The government has not made any effort to find these children.”

Still, migrant youngsters are recognized to be susceptible to each sexual abuse and labor exploitation. And the Trump administration’s determination to strip migrant youngsters of their authorized illustration makes them extra vulnerable to such hurt, advocates say.

“I’ve seen how, without a legal advocate representing their interests, unaccompanied children can really get lost,” Nick Cuneo, a health care provider who has labored with unaccompanied youngsters, stated on the Amica name.

“Legal representatives are often on the frontline of kids disclosing what’s happening to them,” he added. “As we know, kids without parental figures or close guardians can be subject to predation, and there have been reports of labor trafficking and so forth in the United States with this population in particular that I have seen bear out in anecdotes. Often, attorneys are the ones who are able to pick up on when a child is being mistreated or abused.”

“It’s hard to rationalize any way that makes sense,” Cuneo stated, referring to the administration’s determination to take away an “extra layer of protection” for unaccompanied youngsters.

Jesús Güereca, a managing lawyer at Estrella del Paso in El Paso, Texas, stated on the decision that migrant youngsters represented by attorneys “have that trust in us, so they’re able to tell us [about things that are happening to them]and we’re able to do something about that.”

“Inside of a shelter, our primary goal is to keep the children safe,” Güereca stated. “That’s what this funding does. It helps keep the children safe. We’re an extra set of eyes, an extra set of ears, an extra set of adults that care about these children.”

“Without this funding, that’s going away.”