HHS funding cuts prompt lawsuits from legal groups working with immigrant child sex abuse survivors

A pregnant 16-year-old girl who had been a victim of sex trafficking since she was 6 crossed the border from Mexico seeking to prevent the same kind of abuse from happening to her child. 

A Los Angeles-based group gave legal help to the immigrant teen and her 1-year-old toddler so they could stay safely in the U.S. The group is part of a string of organizations that on Wednesday sued the U.S. Department of  Health and Human Services for “shutting down critical legal representation programs for unaccompanied immigrant children.”

“What kind of system do we have when our government is more willing to pay an attorney to deport a child than it is to provide the same child with an attorney whose job is to protect their rights?” Alvaro Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy for Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said in a statement. The lawsuit was filed in a California federal district court.

President Donald Trump touted during his campaign last year that he protected children and women from human trafficking in his first term. But attorneys say his current administration has put thousands of children in danger by ending funding for lawyers that help them through immigration court processes.

For many immigrant children, the lost legal help could mean being separated from families, guardians or sponsors who are or could care for them in the U.S. and preventing them from ending up back in abusive, and possibly deadly situations, attorneys argue.

By canceling the contract to fund the groups providing legal help, organizations representing the children have been forced to lay off lawyers, search for other ways to fund the legal help or, ultimately, withdraw from cases. 

Huerta’s organization, which helped the teen sex trafficking victim and her baby, has already been forced to give layoff notices to 27 of its staffers to try to stay financially viable and help as many clients as possible, according to the lawsuit. The group Estrella Del Paso, in El Paso, Texas, furloughed 18 of 28 employees in its unaccompanied children program and the Galveston-Houston Immigration Representation Project (GHRIP) will have to lay off most of the 19 employees providing services to unaccompanied children.  

One of GHRIP’s clients is a 2-year-old child who arrived with her teenage mother, also an unaccompanied minor who was a victim of abuse. GHIRP managing attorney Alexa Sendukas told NBC News she’s attempting to get a special immigrant juvenile status for the toddler, a multistep process that involves seeking a determination from a local juvenile court that it’s not in the child’s best interest to return her to her home country. 

Getting permanent legal status for the child could take five years or more, but the funding cuts jeopardize Sendukas’ ability to stay on the case, she said. GHIRP has about 300 unaccompanied children clients whose legal representation was paid for by the funding that’s been cut off. The organization is trying to determine what it can do, because attorneys also have ethical obligations that complicate withdrawing from cases. 

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests from NBC News for comment on the lawsuit and on the legal groups’ criticism of the funding cuts and their projected effects on the children.

On a potential deportation track

Some children who have fled trafficking, violence, starvation and abuse are being stripped of legal aid to help them stay in the U.S. as the Trump administration has made them a priority for deportation, the immigrant legal groups said.

NBC News reported last month that the Trump administration was planning to locate and potentially deport unaccompanied children. 

Left at risk are children such as a 12-year-old boy from Central America with a severe disability that impairs his ability to speak. Emily Norman, managing director of the Hartford, Connecticut, office of Kids In Need of Defense, KIND, has been representing him. 

His mother died, his father was physically abusive and the boy was forced to work since he was even younger, while enduring bullying for his disability, Norman said. He was eventually abandoned by his father, and a family member who brought him to the U.S. cannot care for him anymore, she said. 

After months of weekly, lengthy meetings, the boy has started to be able to communicate and KIND was about to begin the process of helping him apply for special immigrant juvenile status, a designation for children under 21 who have been abused, abandoned or neglected.

Though the special status can lead to legal permanent residency, the boy is now in deportation proceedings in immigration court. “Now we’ve lost the funding and we cannot continue to represent him,” Norman said. 

“My worst fear is he is going to be deported back to a country where he has no one to take care of him and he can’t communicate. How is he even going to ask for help if he needs it?” Norman said, her voice becoming emotional. “We have so many kids in this position and now we are going to have to call them and tell them, ‘We said we were going to be there for you and now you are on your own.'”

Only about 1 in 5 of the estimated 118,000 unaccompanied children in the U.S. have legal representation, leaving many of them to show up in court alone or with a parent, guardian or sibling who may not speak English or isn’t likely to have much more of an understanding of the language themselves, according to Bilal Askaryar, a spokesperson for Acacia Center for Justice.

Acacia, whose contract with the government was not renewed, had subcontracted more than 100 groups around the country, including KIND, to provide legal help to about 26,000 unaccompanied children. 

Attorneys with the groups who’ve lost funding said their clients have begun to get notices to appear for immigration court hearings, even if the child is in the midst of getting some form of protection from deportation and permission to remain in the U.S. Some children are also ending up on “rocket dockets” a term for accelerated deportation processes, according to Acacia Center for Justice.  

The Trump administration will now share the immigration status of adults who sponsor unaccompanied children with law enforcement and the Office of Refugee Resettlement. This means ORR can decide not to release children to sponsors — parents, guardians or family members — because the sponsor doesn’t have legal immigration status. 

The impact of some of the recent changes are beginning to surface. 

“We have seen situations where loving family members who have cared for the children previously are seeking to sponsor them out of our custody and are unable to, and it’s leading to increased requests for transfer to long-term foster care,” Sendukas of GHIRP said. “We’ve even seen increased requests from children for voluntary departure because they believe there’s no one who can receive them and they’ll be detained forever.”

‘Left on their own’

During his first term, Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that culminated with separating children from their parents or guardians drew heavy backlash. While attorneys who spoke to NBC News were unwilling to equate the stripping of legal representation to border separations, several said the new policy would traumatize children, many of whom have already been repeatedly traumatized. 

Kayleen Hartman, KIND’s managing attorney for family unity, focuses on children who have been separated from their parents. Hartman said she is “finding it heartbreaking” that she may have to end representation for a girl who was about 7 years old when she was “physically, tearfully, forcefully” separated from her father under Trump’s policy by agents and officers who didn’t speak her and her father’s Indigenous language. 

The father was deported and the girl was sent to a foster care home where she was reprimanded for not speaking and understanding Spanish, according to Hartman. She was relocated to the home of distant relatives and bounced around other households, before ending up with another distant relative, where she was sexually assaulted by a male family member, Hartman said. The girl told a friend of the assault and the friend’s mother informed state child welfare workers, who put the girl in foster care. That’s when KIND picked up her case, Hartman said. KIND used a process made possible by the Biden Family Unification Task Force to reunite her with her father in the U.S.

Hartman said she and her team are “scrambling” to get temporary legal status set up for the girl before KIND has to close the case, but immigration backlogs make it impossible to get this done quickly. 

Almost all the clients they’re currently sitting down with to tell them they can’t be their attorneys any longer “are clients with a background and a history of trauma,” Hartman said. “These are kids that have been abandoned and left on their own.”  

KIND has about 4,400 cases that were supported by funding from Acacia Center for Justice. Wendy Young, KIND’s president, said the funding cutoff means the group has had to downsize, laying off a number of staffers. The group is now trying to place cases with private sector pro bono partners but, in most cases, KIND will have to withdraw, Young said. 

The result will be that children won’t show up for proceedings and won’t get protections for which they may be eligible. 

“This administration is driving us back 30 years,” Young said, a time “when children were forced to navigate a complex adversarial immigration system in a courtroom by themselves, regardless of whether they were 2 years old or 6 years old.”