CHICAGO — The Trump administration has awarded a $150 million contract to give legal representation to migrant children traveling alone to the U.S. to a small Texas law firm with ties to the administration but little experience in immigration law. The move has prompted legal aid groups that have long represented those children to warn that the move could make them vulnerable to deportation.
The contract to the Houston-based Burke Law Group comes as the Trump administration ramps up its mass deportation campaign across the country and after the administration last week let a key contract with a network of legal groups working with immigrant children around the country expire with no replacement. The providers have increasingly raised worries that children won’t have the experienced legal help they need at a time when the administration is intensifying efforts to remove people from the country.
Michael Lukens, who heads the Amica Center, called the idea that the administration had given the sole-source contract to the Texas firm “upsetting and shocking.”
“It really does forebode a situation where children are going to get no meaningful due process, no meaningful day in court. We cannot have a random law firm entrusted to take care of children,” Lukens said.
The groups said the contract announced Tuesday only applies to the children currently held in government-run shelters and that the government would need to issue another contract covering services for migrant children outside the shelter system. Lukens said that there are currently about 1,800 children living in shelters, and roughly 22,000 living outside with sponsors, such as family members.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the government agency responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children, did not respond to requests for comment.
Contract goes to firm with Trump administration ties
The Trump administration announced late Tuesday that it was hiring the Houston-based Burke to provide legal services to unaccompanied children. The yearlong contract starts Aug. 15.
Only two of the 25 lawyers listed on the firm’s website on Wednesday morning claim relevant experience in immigration law in their biographies.
Many of the others at the firm are corporate lawyers with ties to conservative causes and to President Trump. The firm’s founder, Marcella Burke, served in Trump’s first administration as a lawyer in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.
Others on its roster include Justin Shubow, the leading supporter of Trump’s efforts to require federal buildings to adhere to classical and traditional architectural styles, and a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Prominent conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro is listed as a “senior counsel.”
The firm and the founder didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.
The notice says Burke’s contract is a “single source cooperative agreement,” which means the administration picked the firm without a competitive bidding process. It did not offer a justification for bypassing standard bidding rules.
Government required to facilitate legal representation
Migrant children alone are viewed as especially vulnerable because of their age and are usually entrusted to U.S. government care. There are various legal protections that apply to them once they’re in the U.S., including the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which requires the government to facilitate legal representation for children put into deportation proceedings.
That representation, until recently, was carried out by a network of nearly 100 legal aid providers across the country that provided know-your-rights trainings to children in shelters and directly represented them in court proceedings.
But last Friday marked the last day of that contract and, until late Tuesday, it wasn’t clear if a new contract would be put in place and, if it was, who would do the work.
On top of the contract uncertainty, the legal aid providers say they’ve been struggling to get repaid for work they have already done since last November. The groups say the administration is asking for detailed information about their clients that they say they’re not ethically able to provide.
Legal advocates say they’ve seen other trends that worry them. Since April, the courts started to call dozens of cases at once in so-called rocket dockets, and immigrant children have had their hearings moved up and given less time to prepare.
Emails to providers, multiple lawyers at courts cause confusion
Other recent occurrences have raised questions about the administration’s intentions regarding the children’s legal representation and caused confusion.
The Associated Press obtained emails sent by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency responsible for overseeing unaccompanied migrant children, to lawyers representing migrant children in federal custody. The emails, sent late Tuesday, asked for their clients’ personal identification numbers and requested the lawyers respond within four hours confirming they would be appearing to represent their clients in upcoming hearings.
It was not immediately clear why the administration was making such requests of the children’s lawyers.
Separately, attorneys in courtrooms across the country said their hearings were interrupted by lawyers claiming they had been asked by the Trump administration to take over the children’s cases, without having given prior notice.
At a hearing in Chicago Wednesday morning for unaccompanied detained immigrant children, an attorney who did not represent any of the children suddenly appeared via video stream, in an exchange witnessed by an Associated Press reporter.
The attorney said she was with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a legal aid group, and that the organization had been contacted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to “appear on behalf” of children without legal representation due to a “gap in legal services.” She said her organization had received the children’s private information, including their names and identifying numbers, from the federal government.
The judge said that since all the children already had lawyers, he wasn’t going to allow anyone to watch on the video stream, and the outside attorney dropped off.
Laura Smith, an attorney representing some of the children, expressed confusion about why the person was there: “It sounds like this is a person who has my client’s information.”
The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants referred questions from The Associated Press to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Alexa Sendukas, the managing attorney at the Galveston Houston Immigrant Representation Project, said one of her organization’s attorneys witnessed a similar confusion play out in court Wednesday morning in Houston and that her organization had heard of similar situations in other courtrooms across the country.
