Since last week, more unaccompanied minors than ever have navigated U.S. immigration court alone. Now, city and state officials have announced a reprieve with an infusion of $7.25 million dollars into legal services to help immigrant children in New York.
Flanked by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and State Attorney General Letitia James, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the new funds Wednesday at a press conference in downtown Manhattan. The leaders stood with multiple politicians and advocates from around the state, including Linda Wolff, 72, who was pepper-sprayed by ICE in Inwood last month.
While the group lauded the funding commitment, they also decried recent violence by immigration enforcement agents, and pledged to hold accountable those who violate new state sanctuary laws, meant to go into effect in 13 days.
“Imagine being that little kid so scared in an unfamiliar country, missing mom and dad, not knowing much English, trying to defend yourself in court,” Hochul said. “Any parent knows that is preposterous. It’s cruel. It’s illegal.”
While most immigrants do not have a legal right to an attorney in immigration court, children who entered the country without a parent have been afforded some special protections for the last two decades, including the roughly 1,400 kids in New York state.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), passed by Congress in 2008, requires that the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ensure free representation for such children “to the greatest extent practicable.”
But since the second Trump administration, advocates say the federal government has eroded protections for non-citizen children. Most recently, the federal government allowed a massive $365 million contract with the Acacia Center for Justice to lapse on July 31. The funds had previously gone toward hiring lawyers to represent minors facing deportation proceedings.
This forced many children to face judges alone while they waited for a new, lower-cost contract with Texas law firm Burke Law Group to come into effect mid-August. The new contract, posted to the Federal Register days after the last contract expired, was awarded to a 26-person firm in Houston that does not mention immigration work on its website and was founded by a lawyer who previously worked in the first Trump administration.
Burke Law Group seemed to withdraw from the contract in a series of statements to X on Tuesday.
In the meantime, another no-bid, $244 million dollar contract for child legal services was posted to the federal register, instead for organization Our Rescue, a group founded by a former ICE agent who resigned before facing sexual misconduct allegations. The organization, formerly called Operation Underground Railroad, is focused on ending child exploitation and trafficking, according to its website.
Last week, Documented reported from a courtroom where nearly every detained child in federal care had to represent themselves — some of whom were as young as 11 — after lawyers lost funding.
Judge Lisa Ling repeatedly reminded children that they needed to file their asylum applications by their next hearing — some as soon as seven days in the future. One child pushed back on the judge, asking for help in filing the paperwork, only to be denied help.
“I don’t know how to do it,” one boy told the judge in K’iche’. “I don’t know if you can help me fill it out.”
At the time, Faiza Ali, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, was present to watch the proceedings. On Wednesday, Ali stood alongside advocates such as Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.
“A child asking a deportation judge to support them in filling out an asylum application – that is the world we are living in right now,” said Awawdeh at the press conference on Tuesday. “It is beyond horrific that we have to even have these fights in this moment.”
