Trump Regime Cuts Off Legal Services to Immigrant Youth

Because who needs a lawyer to navigate a foreign legal system? Kids?!?

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The Trump administration has halted all legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children. Specifically, it has ordered organizations that provide federally-funded legal representation to immigrant children to stop providing such services.

Federal funding to the tune of $200 million had been provided to the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, which in turn distributed the money to other organizations providing direct legal services to immigrant children. That funding has now been stopped.

As attorney Jonathan Ryan points out, it was lawyers providing these types of services to immigrant youth “who exposed family separation in 2018. Now they're being kicked out of the centers where such kids are kept. What do you think happens next?”

The renowned Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project also reports that it received a stop work order on the services it provides to detained immigrant children, including Know Your Rights presentations and legal education.

This is outrageous. Are children supposed to understand a foreign legal system in a foreign language? That’s asking too much even of adults. Jonathan Ryan’s question is indeed a good one: what happens next? Let’s not forget how the first Trump regime didn’t even keep track of children it separated from their parents. What happens now to unaccompanied children who are in the custody of the U.S. government?

There will be lawsuits, of course. There have already been multiple lawsuits against the curtailment of services for immigrants, including a lawsuit filed in January against the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security for shutting down legal orientation programs for immigrants, including people detained at ICE detention facilities. I’m including a screenshot from the DOJ’s LOP page describing what the LOP is, since the chances are this information will soon be scrubbed from the internet.

Keep in mind, please, an image of what defunding legal services for immigrant children means. Adolescents, pre-teens, five-year-olds are appearing in court alone. Two-year-old toddlers, so small their feet don’t touch the floor when they sit at the table in court, are expected to navigate foster care, guardianship and immigration court on their own.

Most immigrant children arriving alone in the United States are eligible for some kind of legal status. But it’s impossible for them to obtain legal status without the help of an experienced immigration lawyer.

In 2018, the Immigration Counseling Service created this video reenactment, UNACCOMPANIED: Alone in America, that gives you a good idea of what it means for a child to appear in immigration court alone. Watch it in its entirety if you can stand to have your heart broken.

The cruelty is the point.