On Monday morning, children who crossed the border alone start appearing in immigration court without lawyers. The federal contract that funded their representation, held by the Acacia Center for Justice and distributed through a network of roughly 100 legal-service providers under the Office of Refugee Resettlement, expired Friday, July 31 [1][2].
How many children that leaves without counsel depends on which report you read, and the two counts do not match. NPR reports 26,000 unaccompanied children affected, describing more than 25,000 losing legal protections [1]. ABC News reports over 20,000 unaccompanied minors receiving representation through the program [2]. This article leads with NPR's figure because it is the more specific of the two; neither outlet reconciles the gap, which could reflect different slices of the caseload being counted. Either count means thousands of children in courtrooms with no lawyer.
The dispute that killed the contract is about data. Acacia says the government has withheld payment for already-completed work since December 2025 to pressure providers into handing over confidential information about the children they represent, client data and billing records tied to individual relief applications, material covered by attorney-client privilege [1]. 'Government is withholding payment for work already performed to extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to,' the organization said in a statement [1][2]. ORR offered a new contract conditioned on that data-sharing. Acacia declined, and the funding lapsed [1].
The withheld payments total roughly $65 million across all providers, according to ABC News [2]. Kids in Need of Defense says it alone is owed more than $25 million [2]. Legal nonprofits have sued for the owed payments and for continued funding [1]. ProBAR, one provider in the network, has laid off more than 20 percent of its staff [1]. A federal court hearing is set for August 6 on whether the government must resume the withheld payments [2].
'Without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay less than 1% of the time,' attorney Alexa Sendukas said [1]. Estrella del Paso, a provider in the network, put it in one sentence: 'We know what happens to children that go to court without an attorney. In one word, it is deportation.' [1]
Jennifer Podkul of Kids in Need of Defense described the cliff edge built into a contract's end date: 'This contract ends on July 31 ... what if your client has an emergency on Saturday?' [1][2] Mickey Donovan, a provider director, said the obligation does not lapse with the money: 'We have an ethical responsibility. We can't just drop a case.' [1][2]
Neither ORR nor the White House responded to NPR's requests for comment [1].
The mechanism deserves plain statement. By the providers' account, a federal agency stopped paying for finished work in order to obtain privileged information about children, and when the providers refused, the representation lapsed. The children's court dates did not lapse with it. Monday, a docket's worth of kids answer them alone.
