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Trump Is Laying the Groundwork for the Mass Deportation of Migrant Children

Unaccompanied children have become a new front in Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Children look through razor wire after crossing the US-Mexico border.

This story was published in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.

In her decade of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children in Texas, attorney Alexa Sendukas has represented over a hundred children and youth. For years, Sendukas’s work at the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project (GHIRP) had been supported by federal funding meant to ensure that children do not go defenseless in immigration court. But on July 31, the contract governing that work expired.

GHIRP, which currently represents around 500 young clients, is now staring down a situation Sendukas could never have previously imagined: the possibility of withdrawing from hundreds of cases.

The long-standing contract had funded a network of nearly 100 organizations and hundreds of attorneys providing legal aid to more than 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children across the country. In its place, the Trump administration has struck a $20 million agreement with the nonprofit US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and a $158 million contract with Our Rescue, an organization founded by an ex-ICE agent accused of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. On its website, Our Rescue touts its collaboration with law enforcement—but the organization does not appear to have experience providing immigrant legal services.

In the past weeks, some organizations have shut down their legal aid programs for unaccompanied children entirely. Others are preparing to lay off staff and are making difficult decisions about which young clients they can continue representing and which cases they will have to discontinue. Meanwhile, in Central America, one major nonprofit providing social services to returning migrant children told me they are bracing themselves for an influx of deported children they may not have capacity to serve.

This gutting of expert legal assistance for migrant children comes as immigration enforcement increasingly targets children and families, and the federal government fast-tracks court hearings for children across the country.

“It’s very clear that this is a comprehensive targeting of children to accelerate their deportation,” Sendukas said.

The result is a deluge of legal proceedings for migrant children with fewer lawyers than ever to represent them. GHIRP has some 70 asylum interviews scheduled for the next six weeks; last Monday, Sendukas was scheduled for five simultaneous interviews. Some young clients have been working with Sendukas for years. GHIRP’s youngest client is 4 years old.

Texas is a national epicenter for immigration enforcement, and in Houston, local law enforcement collaborates extensively with ICE. Nearly every day, new children continue to arrive to shelters for unaccompanied children within the state, Sendukas says.

Sendukas’s work representing these young people is no longer funded, but if she doesn’t show up for her clients, she asks, who will?

The administration has been trying to make it harder for unaccompanied migrant children to access legal representation since February of last year, when it issued and then quickly rescinded a stop work order for legal services funded through the unaccompanied children contract. The Trump administration’s attempt to prematurely terminate the contract a month later was blocked in federal court.

Yet, while the contract had continued until July 31, the Trump administration stopped paying around December 2025, putting organizations like GHIRP under financial pressure. Earlier this month, a federal court ordered Trump to release those unpaid funds—an amount advocates say........

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