The Trump administration awarded a $150 million contract to the Houston-based Burke Law Group to provide legal representation for unaccompanied migrant children, even though the Texas firm has ties to the administration and little experience in immigration law. The year-long contract starts August 15. The notice said Burke’s contract is a "single source cooperative agreement," meaning the administration picked the firm without a competitive bidding process, and it did not offer a justification for bypassing standard bidding rules.
Who Gets the Contract
The money went to a firm with the right connections, not the right track record. The AP report said only two of the 25 lawyers listed on the firm’s website on Wednesday morning claimed relevant experience in immigration law in their biographies. It said many of the others at the firm are corporate lawyers with ties to conservative causes and to President Trump. Marcella Burke, the firm’s founder, served in Trump’s first administration as a lawyer in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. Others on the roster include Justin Shubow, described as the leading supporter of Trump’s efforts to require federal buildings to adhere to classical and traditional architectural styles and a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and Ilya Shapiro, listed as a "senior counsel."
That’s the machinery at work. A federal contract, a closed process, and a firm with political ties stepping into a role that affects children facing deportation.
Who Pays for the Gap
The contract came as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign and after it let a key contract with a network of legal groups working with immigrant children around the country expire with no replacement. Michael Lukens, who heads the Amica Center, called the sole-source award "upsetting and shocking." He said, "It really does forebode a situation where children are going to get no meaningful due process, no meaningful day in court. We cannot have a random law firm entrusted to take care of children." Lukens said there are currently about 1,800 children living in shelters and roughly 22,000 living outside with sponsors, such as family members.
The state’s choices land on children first. The administration ended one system before clearly replacing it, then handed the work to a firm chosen without competition. The people caught in the middle are the ones with the least power to resist.
The report said the government is required under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 to facilitate legal representation for children put into deportation proceedings. Until recently, that work was carried out by nearly 100 legal aid providers across the country that provided know-your-rights trainings to children in shelters and directly represented them in court proceedings. But last Friday marked the last day of that contract, and until late Tuesday it wasn’t clear if a new contract would be put in place or who would do the work.
What the System Calls Order
Legal aid providers have struggled to get repaid for work they have already done since last November, and the administration is asking for detailed information about their clients that they say they’re not ethically able to provide. The AP said legal advocates have also seen other trends that worry them, including courts starting in April to call dozens of cases at once in so-called "rocket dockets" and immigrant children having hearings moved up and given less time to prepare.
That’s not due process. That’s pressure. Faster hearings, less preparation, and more demands for private information from lawyers already trying to keep children from being swallowed by the deportation machine.
The AP obtained emails sent by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency responsible for overseeing unaccompanied migrant children, to lawyers representing migrant children in federal custody. The emails, sent late Tuesday, asked for clients’ personal identification numbers and requested that lawyers respond within four hours confirming they would appear to represent their clients in upcoming hearings. It was not immediately clear why the administration was making such requests.
Separately, attorneys in courtrooms across the country said their hearings were interrupted by lawyers claiming they had been asked by the Trump administration to take over the children’s cases without prior notice. At a hearing in Chicago Wednesday morning for unaccompanied detained immigrant children, an attorney who did not represent any of the children appeared via video stream and said she was with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a legal aid group. She said the organization had been contacted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to "appear on behalf" of children without legal representation due to a "gap in legal services," and that it had received the children’s private information, including their names and identifying numbers, from the federal government. The judge said that since all the children already had lawyers, he wasn’t going to allow anyone to watch on the video stream, and the outside attorney dropped off.
Laura Smith, an attorney representing some of the children, said, "It sounds like this is a person who has my client’s information." Alexa Sendukas, the managing attorney at the Galveston Houston Immigrant Representation Project, said one of her organization’s attorneys witnessed similar confusion in Houston and that her organization had heard of similar situations in other courtrooms across the country.
The whole arrangement reads like a system improvising on the backs of children. The federal agency sends out private data, lawyers get told to show up fast, and courtrooms turn into sites of confusion while the state keeps the power to decide who gets heard and who gets pushed through.