The faces of the six migrant children beamed into a Manhattan courtroom on large screens. All had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone. All were facing potential deportation. And none had lawyers.
The minors — five boys and a girl, ages 13 to 17 — fidgeted in their seats, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts, as an immigration judge ran through her script. Where were their parents? Were they afraid to return home? Had they found a lawyer?
At times, a lawyer acting as a court adviser interjected from another screen to recommend that the judge grant the children more time to find counsel. The judge, Lisa W. Ling, pressed ahead, often with little more than a nod.
“Do you want the voluntary departure?” she asked a 15-year-old boy from Guatemala during the September hearing.
“Yes, that’s fine,” he replied. It was unclear if the boy knew that meant he was giving up on obtaining legal immigration status and agreeing to leave the country.
The scene in Manhattan has been playing out in courtrooms nationwide for months. In Texas, a 7-year-old agreed to voluntarily leave the country without a lawyer present to explain the legal consequences of the decision. In Arizona, an immigration judge ordered a 1-year-old baby appearing without a lawyer to file an asylum application, according to court filings. The baby’s mother, a 17-year-old who is an unaccompanied minor herself, appeared with the child in court.
Unaccompanied minors went without legal representation in about 55 percent of nearly 50,000 immigration cases completed as of August this year, the highest percentage since 2019, according to an analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research group.
Deportation orders for the children who Vera identified as unaccompanied minors have also surged, topping 7,300 in July, up from 3,500 in May. By comparison, that number was 2,000 in January 2025, according to the group.
The surge in deportations comes amid a monthslong contract battle between the Trump administration and the network of nonprofits that have long provided legal services to migrant children who have arrived at the southern border without their parents or guardians. (Vera held the federal legal services contract until December 2023.)
For decades, the young and vulnerable population has posed deep humanitarian and political challenges for both Republican and Democratic administrations. The minors make perilous journeys north alone, facing higher risks for trafficking and exploitation along the way and once in the United States. A New York Times investigation in 2023 found thousands working dangerous jobs at meatpacking plants and construction sites in violation of child labor laws.
Inside the nation’s immigration courts, they face another set of vexing obstacles. Many children do not have adult guardians to guide them through complex legal claims, and because many may be in pursuit of work or schooling, motives that do not qualify for asylum, they may be unshielded from deportation unless a lawyer can identify other protections.
Although migrant children do not have a right to court-appointed representation, under a 2008 law meant to protect children against human trafficking, the federal government is required to ensure unaccompanied minors have representation “to the greatest extent practicable.”
That responsibility lies with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Officials say they have sought to overhaul their contract to enforce basic oversight of legal services, as they push to clear backlogs, curb fraudulent claims and increase vetting to protect migrant children from abuse and trafficking.
ORR has been in a dispute with the Acacia Center for Justice, a group that had a $200 million contract with the agency to provide legal services for migrant children. The agency allowed that contract to expire at the end of July, arguing that Acacia had refused to share new data to allow it to verify its legal services. Acacia and its nearly 100 legal services subcontractors said the data the administration is seeking is privileged, attorney-client information and assert that the government had improperly cut off funding.
Child advocates say the contract dispute has resulted in unrepresented minors filling courtrooms across the country at a time when the administration is speeding up immigration cases with little notice. With many judges saying they are under intense pressure to deport more people, many minors have been stranded in detention for longer periods of time, and others have been returned to dangerous home countries, lawyers said.
In response to questions about the number of minors going without representation, Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department, said claims that unaccompanied children “are being sent to immigration court without access to legal support do not accurately describe ORR’s role or the legal services available to eligible children in its care.”
“Dedicated public servants are working around the clock to safely reunite these children with their families,” she said.
The contract dispute has prompted a turbulent search for a new legal services provider. In August, officials awarded a contract to Our Rescue, an anti-trafficking group with little immigration court experience. The Acacia Center, which most recently held the contract, filed a formal protest, temporarily blocking Our Rescue’s contract. Officials then considered hiring Pentagon lawyers before abruptly scrapping the plan.
In a quiet federal notice published in late September, the administration indicated it planned to use Health and Human Services’ own lawyers to represent migrant children, a move that former department officials say would be a conflict of interest.
For now, ORR has hired the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or U.S.C.R.I., to provide legal services through December. But the organization’s lawyers had formally represented only 12 children as of early September and a few dozen children by mid-month, according to court testimony and filings. Instead, in the vast majority of cases, U.S.C.R.I. lawyers have appeared as friend-of-the-court advocates, or neutral voices who can inform children of their rights but do not represent them.
Back in the Manhattan courtroom last month, the limitations were clear. A U.S.C.R.I. lawyer remained silent for much of the morning, at times reminding Judge Ling that the contract dispute had kept the agency from being able to secure lawyers for unaccompanied minors on her docket.
In the cases of the six children who appeared in a group, two of the boys agreed to voluntarily leave the country at their own expense. A 13-year-old girl from Honduras refused, saying that she did not fear returning to Honduras but that she had never known her parents and hoped to go to school in the United States.
Although Judge Ling noted the girl might be eligible for a special immigrant status for abused, abandoned and neglected children, she said that process could take years through a state family court. But the girl would need a lawyer to file the case there.
“Based on what you are saying, you are only eligible for voluntary departure,” Judge Ling told the girl. When the child still refused, the judge ordered her deportation.
For years, both Democratic and Republican federal lawmakers sought to ensure all children and teenagers in U.S. immigration custody received shelter, social services and access to a fair legal process. But that bipartisan consensus cracked as hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border during the Obama and first Trump administrations, fleeing rising poverty and violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Many came to reunite with relatives or in the hopes of finding work.
In his second term, the Trump administration has put up new barriers for young migrants to obtain deportation protections and increased its vetting of immigrant relatives and guardians, discouraging many from coming forward. It also has sped up children’s asylum claims, sometimes with only a day’s notice, lawyers said.
Robert Carey, who served as ORR director in the Obama administration, acknowledged that not all unaccompanied children were eligible for immigration relief. But he saw the contract dispute as part of a “systematic dismantling” of guardrails meant to guarantee them a fair process.
“Essentially, there was a wall between enforcement and child protection, and that wall has fallen pretty dramatically,” he said. He added that ORR operated under a simple premise during his tenure: “Not every child deserves asylum, but every child deserves to be heard.”
For 17-year-old Jairo, one of the six on the screen in the Manhattan courtroom, the search for a lawyer was an urgent scramble against a tight deadline.
He had told The Times at a prior hearing that his family had paid smugglers to drive him north in a series of van trips from Guatemala.
He was afraid to return home, he said, and he and an older cousin had been desperately searching for counsel. The boy asked that his full name be withheld for fear of retaliation by U.S. authorities.
Now before Judge Ling again, he asked for more time, saying they had just found a lawyer whose name he could only remember as “Kevin.”
Judge Ling granted him two more weeks.
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