How Trump Is Trying to Weaken Migrant Children’s Legal Defense
On August 4th, an odd notice appeared on the website of the Federal Register: “Announcement of the Intent to Award a Single-Source Cooperative Agreement to Burke Law Group, PLLC in Houston, Texas.” This was federal contract-speak for news that a Houston-based firm with only twenty-four lawyers was poised to receive an enormous, no-bid award, amounting to as much as a hundred and fifty million dollars over the next year, to represent unaccompanied minors detained at immigration facilities. Unlike adults facing deportation and other immigration proceedings in the United States, unaccompanied children must generally be provided with access to a lawyer, under the terms of a 2008 law. The notion is that children are both uniquely vulnerable to trafficking or other mistreatment and incapable of navigating their way through the byzantine immigration system without legal help. Until recently, that aid was supplied by a network of nearly a hundred nonprofit legal groups that relied on a combination of government funding and private donations to represent migrant children. But the government contract for that work expired at the end of July, and, instead of renewing it, the Administration announced its plans to work with other providers.
Burke Law Group was a surprising choice—and, to immigrants’-rights advocates, a concerning one—to receive the award, particularly one of this size, especially as the firm had not had to compete for it. “Burke Law Group advises companies on complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters,” the firm’s website boasted. “We deliver high-stakes commercial litigation and sophisticated corporate counsel.” But the firm had little expertise in the complex area of immigration law. As of the afternoon of August 4th, the day the proposed agreement was announced, none of the attorneys on the firm’s website listed immigration among their specialties; two more attorneys with such expertise were later added, and “Immigration & Asylum” was added to the roster of practice areas highlighted on the site. It seemed daunting, to put it mildly, that such a small firm could gear up quickly enough to represent the approximately eighteen hundred unaccompanied minors currently in immigration shelters. (A bigger group, around twenty thousand, live with relatives or other sponsors; they were also receiving legal representation under the expired contract.) “This is not an area of law that you just walk in and figure out what you’re doing,” Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, one of the groups that previously represented unaccompanied minors, told me. “It’s like traffic court with life-or-death consequences.”
But, if Burke Law suffered from an absence of immigration expertise, it possessed other attributes that may have made it attractive to the Administration. It was based in Texas, where the Administration appears to be planning to consolidate the detention of unaccompanied minors; advocates believe that a large new children’s facility, for which the federal government recently sought bids, will be built. Burke Law also has close ties to, and ideological sympathies with, the Administration. The firm’s founder, Marcella Burke, served in senior positions at the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency during President Donald Trump’s first term. Frustrated with what she saw as the political correctness imposed by the culture of Big Law, she founded her own firm, in 2023. Burke planned to pursue her specialty, energy and environmental law: “If the government or these environmental groups are at your factory gates, you call me and we manage that,” she explained on a March, 2025, podcast.
Although the firm’s lawyers had a conservative bent, Burke said, “We had decided we weren’t going to take on big cultural cases, that the brand of our firm wasn’t going to be that we’re going to be these firebrands.” That changed, a few weeks in, when Burke received a phone call from the conservative activist Christopher Rufo. “I’d never heard of Chris Rufo,” Burke said, but he alerted her to the case of a Texas surgeon who claimed that his hospital had been performing gender-affirming procedures on minors; the surgeon, Eithan Haim, was facing prosecution for unlawfully obtaining private health information. (The charges were eventually dismissed.) That launched Burke on the path of litigating various gender-transition-related cases designed to protect children against what she said could be described as “butchering”—the firm just settled a fraud suit against Texas Children’s Hospital related to gender-affirming procedures—as well as advising employees claiming injury from workplace D.E.I. practices. On the podcast, Burke, with evident delight, quoted Haim’s description of her: “She’s this really serious Catholic lady with a rosary in one hand and a middle finger in the other.”
Other lawyers at the firm have G.O.P. ties; some also have controversial pasts. One, senior counsel Joshua Wright, a former Republican member of the Federal Trade Commission, resigned from George Mason University’s law school after several former students alleged that he had used his position to pressure them for sex. (Wright claimed that the relationships were consensual, sued two of the accusing women for defamation, and pronounced himself “fully vindicated” after settling with one of the women, and dropping his claim against the other.) Another, senior counsel Ilya Shapiro, left his position as the executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution, in 2022, after lamenting, on Twitter, that President Joe Biden’s pledge to name a Black woman as a Supreme Court Justice would result in the choice of a “lesser black woman.” (An investigation by the law school cleared Shapiro on the technicality that he was not yet a Georgetown employee when he posted the tweets.)
The Burke Law agreement, as it happened, was one of two that the Trump Administration announced in the space of several days. The second, valued at between a hundred and fifty-eight million and two hundred and forty-four million dollars, went to Our Rescue, a nonprofit that, like Burke, does not specialize in immigration law; in fact, it does not appear to provide legal services. Rather, the mission of Our Rescue, which used to be known as Operation Underground Railroad, is to save individuals from human-trafficking rings, often through showy sting operations. Its founder, Tim Ballard, is a former Department of Homeland Security agent whose story was featured in the 2023 movie “Sound of Freedom,” which the Guardian described as a “QAnon-adjacent thriller.” Ballard resigned from the organization in 2023, shortly after attending a Trump-hosted screening of the film at the President’s country club in Bedminster, New Jersey; Ballard was later accused in civil lawsuits of coercing women into sexual acts as part of his rescue missions. (One of the lawsuits was dismissed, another is still pending. Ballard has denied any wrongdoing, and local prosecutors in Utah declined to file criminal charges.)
The announcement of the no-bid award to Our Rescue cited the need to “ensure continuity of legal services for unaccompanied alien children.” Immigration advocates’ concerns about this second contract announcement focussed on whether the organization was capable of filling that gap. I spoke with Stephanie Richard, who directs an anti-trafficking program at Loyola Law School. “When I heard that Our Rescue received this national-level grant to protect vulnerable unaccompanied children, as a trained immigration practitioner I cried,” she told me. “I just do not see how an agency whose background is in law enforcement and supporting law-enforcement sting operations is qualified to be the legal-service provider or provide the technical assistance for legal-service provision for unaccompanied children. It’s just a completely different skill set.” Our Rescue sent me a statement from its C.E.O., Derek Benner, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, expressing the organization’s commitment that unaccompanied minors “have access to qualified legal counsel.” The statement continued, “These are among the most vulnerable children in the world, and they deserve nothing less than the full weight of our experience.” Our Rescue did not respond to additional questions.
The Trump Administration’s original goal wasn’t to redirect the lucrative contracts to favored groups. Rather, the Administration has been determined to remove as many unaccompanied minors from the country as possible, part of its larger drive, in the words of a White House spokesperson, “to carry out the largest, lawful deportation operation of criminal illegal aliens in history.” As that mission unfolded, the Administration sought to cut off funding altogether for the unaccompanied minors’ lawyers. On March 21, 2025, the Administration informed the Acacia Center for Justice—which administered the legal-services contract—that it was terminating the arrangement, effective immediately. A number of the legal providers filed suit. They argued that the funding was required under the 2008 law, which states that the government must provide minors with lawyers “to the greatest extent practicable.” The Trump Administration asserted that this language was more encouragement than mandate. The law, “which authorizes such funding, does not require it, and such services are entirely at the agency’s discretion,” Toby Biswas, a senior official in the office that runs the unaccompanied-minors program, wrote in an affidavit. The district court judge hearing the case disagreed and ordered that the government had to continue funding legal services. The law, he said, “requires something more than zero expenditure where appropriated funds are available and the agencies fail to show any effort to ensure representation through alternative means.” A federal appeals court upheld the order.
But the Administration persisted. In December, 2025, it stopped paying the lawyers, citing “invoice substantiation concerns.” (Last week, the lower court ordered the government to pay more than sixty-five million dollars to the attorneys for their services.) In the meantime, it sought personal information about the unaccompanied minors, which their lawyers said would violate attorney-client privilege; this led to a standoff over renewing the contract, and to its eventual expiration. “If you connect all the dots, it’s clear that they’re trying to use our confidential information to essentially prioritize which kids they should target,” Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, told me.
It does not take a great leap of imagination to think that the Burke Law attorneys would be more compliant with the Administration’s demands for client information. A more cynical view is that, given the Administration’s original effort to eliminate the funding for the lawyers, the White House would not be particularly concerned if Burke’s expertise in immigration matters was less than optimal. “The government has been on a tear trying to deport as many kids as possible,” Lukens said. “We’re at a moment where there’s not a worse time in the last twenty years for a child not to have a good attorney.”
On Tuesday afternoon, the Burke Law story took an unexpected twist. I had reached out to Burke Law and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.)—which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and which oversees the unaccompanied-minors program—for comment on how the firm was selected, why the contract was to be awarded without competing bids (a move that is supposed to be reserved for unusual, emergency situations), and how the firm could manage the complex workload. I received an e-mail response from an unnamed O.R.R. spokesperson. It said, in part, that “Burke Law Group has declined to apply and has not been awarded any grant with ORR,” that “ORR has published notices in the Federal Register in an abundance of transparency regarding a potential grant recipient,” and that “ORR is committed to ensuring every [unaccompanied minor] has legal representation,” a questionable assertion given O.R.R.’s arguments in the court case that it had no such duty.
Shortly after, I received an e-mail from Marcella Burke, whose firm had repeatedly declined to respond to other requests for comment. “There is and never was a contract,” Burke wrote, directing me to a post on her firm’s X account citing “false reporting” about the agreement. “We were approached by the Trump administration to fill a gap in legal services and we were considering how we might help,” the statement said, continuing that the firm was “in fact only considering applying for a small portion” of the hundred-and-fifty-million sum—a statement that seems at odds with the government’s announced plan to award the money to a single entity. O.R.R. and Burke did not respond to requests for clarification, but the most likely explanation for this turn of events is that, in the wake of negative press about the firm’s lack of immigration expertise and its capacity to handle the caseload, Burke Law got cold feet.
In its statement to me, O.R.R. said that it had turned to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (U.S.C.R.I.) to “provide legal representation to all UAC,” referring to unaccompanied alien children. In a court filing on Thursday, an O.R.R. official said that the government had agreed to pay U.S.C.R.I. up to twenty million dollars through December. The affidavit stated that U.S.C.R.I. had a total of fifty-seven lawyers and support staff on tap; it did not provide any specifics about Our Rescue’s capacity. By contrast, the legal-services organizations funded through Acacia employ some eight hundred lawyers, and another several hundred paralegals.
The court dispute is ongoing; the coming weeks will likely see an argument over whether the government is fulfilling its obligations to the unaccompanied minors. Meanwhile, the legal-services groups under the expired contract are trying to figure out how to continue to represent their existing clients despite the lack of funds, all while new unaccompanied minors detained by ICE are turning up in shelters.
Acacia’s executive director, Shaina Aber, said that she is alarmed about what will happen. “If children are not able to retain the counsel that they have because of the financial situation that the various nonprofits are facing, then we will see kids removed very, very quickly,” she told me. “Because there certainly are not enough attorneys at U.S.C.R.I. or Our Rescue, as far as I can see, to actually handle this caseload. And I’m really worried about children feeling that they have no choice but to abandon their legal claims and getting bad legal advice.” Aber framed the Administration’s assault on lawyers as part of its larger deportation strategy. “From the outset of this Administration, a priority has been on stripping children of their legal rights,” she said. “And this episode is a culmination of what the Administration has been trying to do for a long time, which is to pump up their deportation numbers on the backs of children.” ♦