By Andrew Garcia, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School
STUDENT VOICES: The views expressed below are those of the student author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Access to Justice Lab.
The treatment of immigrant children in immigration proceedings should be of heightened importance to the access to justice movement. Access to representation in immigration proceedings is not constitutionally guaranteed. As popularized in crime television, your right to an attorney, if you cannot afford one, is generally only provided in criminal proceedings. Under the Sixth Amendment, there is no general federal Gideon right to counsel in civil matters, and no such right applies to immigration proceedings. So, any legal aid provided is likely the only support available for children subject to removal proceedings.
When in federal immigration custody, a child’s access to resources, representation, or support is under the government’s control. Children are already vulnerable, lacking sufficient agency to navigate their own care, much less to assess the viability of their claims for political asylum or Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (“SIJS”). This vulnerability is compounded when children are unaccompanied, whether by being separated from their parents in the United States, by having been trafficked, or by suffering from other circumstances beyond their control. In 2025, an alarming story received national media coverage: “Three-year-old child forced to serve as her own attorney in Tucson immigration court.” Many asked how such a thing could happen. The answer traces back to the early 2000s.
Funding for Legal Representation
The proposition that unaccompanied minors should not face a complex, foreign immigration system alone is not new. Images of very young children alone in immigration court—wearing oversized headphones and seated before an immigration judge—underscore the stakes. The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (“TVPRA”) requires that the government “shall ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied children receive legal counsel to represent them in “legal proceedings” and to “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation, and trafficking.” The TVPRA directs the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) to carry out these obligations. HHS does so by funding legal service providers who provide direct representation for unaccompanied children subject to Congress’s appropriations.
Litigation for Funding
Since 2012, and as recently as March 15, 2025, Congress has appropriated funds to ensure compliance with the TVPRA. Despite the availability of appropriations through September 2027 and the TVPRA’s mandate, on March 21, 2025, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent a notice stating that it would be terminating HHS’s legal service contracts. Legal service providers across the country were abruptly cut off from the funds necessary to provide representation for approximately 26,000 unaccompanied children. A group of organizations filed suit against HHS in federal court in the Northern District of California. In Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto v. Department of Health and Human Services, the district court agreed with the legal service providers and ordered the government to resume funding legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children. The government then asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to block the lower court’s injunction pending appeal. In May 2025, The Ninth Circuit upheld the federal district court’s order and denied the government’s request for a stay. After its loss in court, the government appears to have adopted a different strategy.
Changes in Legal Service Contracts
The Trump Administration has proposed changes to the legal defense program for thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children. Leaked government memos and procurement records reveal significant departures from past service contracts. Now, the intention is to require attorneys to share detailed information about their clients with the government, limit lawyers’ resources, and encourage critical legal services to be provided virtually. The new contracts also reduce funding by switching to a fixed-payment amount per case instead of compensation tied to time spent and replace in-person services for minors as young as two with virtual computer-based “know your rights” lessons and intake procedures to allow “audiovisual tools to ensure timely delivery of the legal orientation.” The new bidding process may endanger children’s legal rights, violate their privacy, and deprive them of meaningful resources in their immigration cases.
Advocates contend that this shift is the administration’s attempt to privatize legal aid for migrant children and to turn the office overseeing the legal defense network into another arm of immigration enforcement. The Acacia Center, the umbrella organization that subcontracted to the Plaintiff organizations in CLEPA v. HHS, was recently outbid for a $821 million government contract to become the legal service provider for migrant children released from the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s custody. ICF International, a large information technology vendor and trusted partner to the Department of Homeland Security for over 20 years, partnered with Kids In Need of Defense to win that bid.
Future Advocacy for Unaccompanied Minors
Unaccompanied immigrant children should not face their immigration cases without quality legal representation. Yet, as the federal government works to dismantle the legal defense program, children are falling through the cracks. Many unaccompanied minors are facing judges alone. As federal and state policies escalate to target immigrant children in school, children will continue to face significant harm. Meanwhile, legal aid organizations face severe losses in funding.
Legal aid organizations have been repeatedly threatened with the prospect of losing government funding. In 2025, the Trump administration released a budget proposing to slash funding for the Legal Services Corporation (“LSC”), the nation’s largest funder of civil legal aid, by 96 percent. Despite the administration’s intentions, Congress passed $540 million for the LSC in Fiscal Year 2026. Legal aid may live to fight another day, but the TVPRA’s cautionary tale suggests the need for continued safeguards. Access to justice advocates can respond to government efforts to defund legal aid by cultivating alternative funding sources and lobbying for more comprehensive legislation on behalf of their clients.
Loopholes in the law, or the outright absence of protections, leave unaccompanied minors vulnerable. By lobbying for meaningful protections and the closing of loopholes, advocates can minimize the harm these children face. For example, the TVPRA’s wording requiring the government to fund legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant minors “to the greatest extent practicable” may limit the government’s obligations. Revising the statutory language to more clearly require representation would move toward securing a unique civil Gideon right for unaccompanied immigrant minors. But legal representation alone falls short of comprehensively protecting vulnerable immigrant youth. The failure to replace the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program and provide DACA-recipients and other similarly situated immigrant youth with permanent immigration status perpetuates vulnerability and harm as well. Until more meaningful steps are taken to ensure unaccompanied immigrant minors have access to the resources that will best support them, these children will continue to be denied access to justice.
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