I’ve sat across from a lot of people the system was never built to protect — combat vets who couldn’t get a claims officer to return a call, single mothers navigating a housing bureaucracy that treats “proof of income” like a riddle. I thought I had a pretty high bar for what counts as bureaucratic failure dressed up as neutrality. Then I read what happened to 26,000 kids this weekend, and the bar moved.
Here’s the plain version, no spin required, because the facts do the work on their own: for more than two decades, U.S. law has required the government to make sure unaccompanied children crossing the border alone — kids who arrive with no parent, no guardian, no advocate — get connected to legal representation once they’re in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. That requirement exists for an obvious reason. Children alone in an immigration system are exactly the population most vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking, and simply being lost in the paperwork. A network of roughly 100 nonprofit legal groups around the country has handled that work for years, funded through a federal contract with ORR.
In November, that funding relationship broke down. ORR stopped paying the legal network after the attorneys declined to hand over confidential information about the children to the agency — the kind of client confidentiality standard that exists in basically every other area of American law. The contract limped along and then formally expired this past Friday. As of Monday, an estimated 26,000 children were left without guaranteed legal representation, according to reporting from NPR and its member stations.
I want to be precise about why this matters, because it’s easy for a story like this to get filed under “immigration politics” and scrolled past by people who’ve made up their minds about border policy one way or the other. This isn’t really a border policy story. Nobody had to change a law, hold a hearing, or win a floor vote to make this happen. A contract lapsed. That’s it. An entire category of due process for children — a legal protection that survived multiple administrations of both parties for over twenty years — evaporated because of a paperwork standoff over data-sharing, with zero public debate about whether that trade-off was the right one.
Attorney Alexa Sendukas put a number on what that actually means for these kids in practice: without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the country less than one percent of the time. Some of these children will now be expected to represent themselves — as minors, in immigration court, against government attorneys — or simply go through deportation proceedings with no one in the room whose job is to advocate for them specifically.
I’m not going to pretend this is a simple issue with an obvious villain. Immigration enforcement is one of the most legitimately contested policy areas in American life right now, and UNJ isn’t in the business of pretending otherwise or picking a side in that broader fight. Reasonable people disagree hard on border security, on deportation levels, on how the system should work at the macro level. But there’s a difference between that debate and this specific mechanism: the government deciding, without a vote, without a public hearing, through the quiet expiration of a services contract, that a two-decade-old child-protection standard simply stops applying. That’s not policy. That’s process being used to avoid policy — because policy requires you to defend your position in daylight, and letting a contract lapse doesn’t.
This is where I’d point to something Protestant pastors have actually been fairly clear-eyed about this year. Lifeway Research found that pastors are genuinely split on deportation levels and enforcement mechanics — this isn’t a community where everyone agrees — but there’s real convergence on a few specific things: prioritizing the removal of violent offenders over blanket enforcement, preserving family unity, and protecting basic human dignity in how the system treats people, especially children, who have no power to protect themselves. You don’t have to be a person of faith to land in the same place. You just have to believe that whatever your views on the border are, a nine-year-old shouldn’t be the one absorbing the consequences of a funding dispute over confidentiality rules.
What would actually fixing this look like? It’s not complicated, and that’s part of what makes the current situation so frustrating. Congress funded this program for a reason and can direct ORR to either restore the contract or open it to competitive rebid with clear data-sharing terms negotiated up front, not as a post-hoc demand. If there’s a legitimate government interest in the information ORR was requesting, that’s a conversation to have transparently, in public, with the legal network and child-welfare advocates in the room — not a lever to pull that results in kids losing counsel as a side effect. And in the interim, state bar associations and pro bono networks in border and major-metro states, including here in Wisconsin, can and should be surging volunteer capacity the way they have during prior legal-aid funding gaps. It won’t cover 26,000 kids. It will cover some of them, and some is better than none while the contract fight gets sorted out.
I keep coming back to a simple test I use for stories like this: strip out every word that signals which political tribe you’re supposed to be rooting for, and ask what’s actually happening to the person with the least power in the story. In this one, that’s a child, alone, in a country that isn’t home, about to walk into a courtroom with no one beside them — not because Congress decided that was acceptable, but because nobody had to decide anything at all. That should bother you regardless of where you land on immigration writ large. It bothers me. And it should be fixed in the open, not left to expire quietly again.
— Marcus Hart