(Update: The stop work order was rescinded on Feb. 21 and organizations have since resumed services.)
Alexa Sendukas, managing attorney at immigrant legal aid nonprofit Galveston Houston Immigrant Representation Project, received the first call Wednesday night from one of her clients worried about whether she would still be his lawyer.
He had heard about the Trump administration’s decision to end funding for legal services for migrant children who travel to the U.S. without an adult, a decision that will impact 26,000 kids and youth nationwide, including at least 1,500 served by GHIRP in the Houston area last year.
The Department of the Interior sent a memo Tuesday to nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice to pause services through its Unaccompanied Children program, including direct representation of clients and information sessions in shelters for migrant children to educate them about the court system and their rights.
Acacia Center for Justice, which serves 5,300 children locally, partners with organizations in Houston to administer these services, including GHIRP, Church World Service, RAICES, Kids in Need of Defense, and Catholic Charities.
Without these services, lawyers and advocates worry migrant children won’t face a fair shot in immigration court and will lose protections granted by Congress through the Trafficking and Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.
“These are critically important services,” said Sendukas, who oversees GHIRP’s children and youth program. “Even the most basic legal orientation presentation covers extremely complicated and important information that these children do not have any other way of learning.”
This stop work order is the latest in a series of cuts to federal funding for immigration services, such as refugee resettlement and legal services at court, since President Donald Trump took office in January. Legal challenges seek to reinstate these funds, but none has been filed yet for this particular funding for migrant children. Still, even a pause in funding is already affecting migrant kids in Houston.
“It’s been operating for many years, so to politicize it and completely halt all services overnight without warning, it will have devastating consequences,” Sendukas said.
Sendukas assured her client Wednesday that she will continue representing him to meet her ethical obligations as his attorney. But GHIRP and other service providers will have to seek additional funding to continue serving current clients and connecting with new ones.
Impact on Harris County
Harris County is the top destination for unaccompanied minors, according to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that oversees unaccompanied minors. The U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, ORR’s parent agency, did not respond to a request for comment about the funding pause.
National nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) serves 4,500 clients nationwide, including some Houston immigrants through Houston-area pro-bono partners.
Jennifer Podkul, chief of global policy and advocacy at KIND, criticized the funding halt for exposing kids and youth to more vulnerable situations.
“This stop-work order eliminates a child’s hope for fair process in an adversarial complex immigration court designed for adults,” Podkul said in a press call Wednesday.
The funding cuts will make an already backlogged immigration system even slower, advocates on the call said.
More than 3.7 million cases are now pending in immigration courts nationwide, according to immigration data tracker Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Nearly 99,000 are in Houston’s three immigration courts. More than a quarter of these cases in Houston are immigrants under 18.
Access to legal services helps the entire court system run more smoothly, said Stan Perry, a lawyer with Reed Smith that takes unaccompanied minor cases pro bono. Judges spend less time explaining the process to kids who are overwhelmed and anxious, freeing up time to get through cases more quickly.
Without these legal services, all cases in courts will be affected.
“What you’ll see is in the Houston immigration courts, which already have a massive backlog, that backlog will get even worse,” Perry said in the press call. “There won’t be any efficiency. It will become more and more inefficient and ineffective.”
Losing legal resources also makes migrant kids more vulnerable to human trafficking and exploitation, particularly in Houston, which is a trafficking hub, Perry said.
The stop work order also ends funding for interpretation services, which will make it more difficult to represent clients who speak one of Guatemala’s 24 Indigenous languages or Haitian Creole, Sendukas said.
Sendukas and other advocates urged the administration to resume funding these services.
“Hopefully they will start releasing the funds again once there’s a closer look at the importance of this, particularly for the administration’s goal of ending the exploitation and trafficking of children,” Podkul said.
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