The federal contract that paid roughly 100 legal aid organizations to represent unaccompanied migrant children expired on July 31 [1]. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the arm of the Department of Health and Human Services that administered it, says the $65 million agreement with the Acacia Center for Justice simply reached its end date, that the agency complied with its legal obligations, and that it had offered Acacia a second bridge contract which Acacia declined [3].
The number of children on the other side of that contract is not settled. Al Jazeera reports roughly 24,000 [1]. WCJB, citing the program's figures, reports more than 20,000 [3]. Acacia itself put the number above 26,000 in a March 2025 statement responding to an earlier termination attempt, when it also said the network ran through more than 130 subcontracted legal organizations [6]. The three counts were taken at different moments and none of them is a live census. The defensible floor is somewhere north of 20,000 children.
What the statute requires is more specific than the funding fight suggests. The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, Pub. L. 110-457, is codified at 8 U.S.C. 1232. Subsection (c)(5) directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to ensure, in the statute's words, "to the greatest extent practicable and consistent with section 292 of the Immigration and Nationality Act," that all unaccompanied alien children "have counsel to represent them in legal proceedings" [2]. The same subsection tells the Secretary to make every effort to use pro bono counsel who will work without charge [2].
That qualifier does real work in both directions. To the greatest extent practicable is not a guarantee of a lawyer for every child, and the pro bono language gives the department an argument that the duty can be discharged through volunteers rather than a contract. It is also not nothing. The clause names an obligation that sits on the Secretary personally and does not lapse when a procurement does. Representatives Chris Deluzio and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania have written to HHS asking how the expiration complies with the 2008 law [1].
The question of what representation is worth has a documented answer. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse obtained immigration court records from the Executive Office for Immigration Review under FOIA and matched children's decided cases against whether a lawyer appeared. For cases decided in fiscal years 2012 through 2014, children with an attorney were allowed to remain in the United States 73 percent of the time and were ordered removed 12 percent of the time, with 15 percent taking voluntary departure. Children without an attorney were allowed to remain 15 percent of the time and were ordered removed 80 percent of the time, with 5 percent taking voluntary departure [4].
Those figures are more than a decade old. A newer study led by Chiara Galli at the University of Chicago, published in International Migration Review and covering 2009 through March 2023, found that only 51 percent of unaccompanied children had an immigration attorney at any point in their removal proceedings, and that 56 percent of decided cases ended in a deportation order. Cases that reached a decision had been pending an average of six years [5]. A six-year median is worth sitting with. A child who arrives at eleven is seventeen when the ruling comes.
Providers say the money stopped well before the contract did. Alexandra Manrique Alfonso of Americans for Immigrant Justice described the sequence plainly: "We also haven't been paid for the last few months of work, about five or six months of work, so we've been using our reserves to continue these services" [3]. Organizations across the network have furloughed and laid off staff [1]. The practical effect is that the July 31 date landed on groups that had already been shrinking for two quarters, which is a different thing from a program ending on schedule with its capacity intact.
Melissa Lopez, who runs Estrella El Paso, put the immediate problem in one sentence: "We have no understanding of what's going to happen to those children" [1].
This is the second attempt. The administration moved to terminate the same representation program in March 2025, drawing the Acacia statement quoted above, and a federal judge subsequently ordered the funding to continue [6]. Letting a contract reach its expiration date is a cleaner mechanism than a termination notice, because there is no order to enforce against an agreement that has simply run out. That distinction is the substance of what Deluzio and Lee are asking about.
What happens next is procedural and fast. Children with pending hearings keep their hearing dates whether or not anyone is funded to appear beside them. Attorneys already entered in a case do not automatically withdraw, though their organizations may be unable to keep paying them. The department's position is that pro bono capacity and the offered bridge contract satisfy the statute. The measurable question, which the court data already answers for an earlier cohort, is what share of the next 20,000 children walks into an immigration courtroom with no one at the table.
