The contract ends next week. After that, the government will have done something that no administration in modern American history has done at this scale: it will have taken the lawyers away from more than 20,000 children and sent them into immigration court alone.
These are unaccompanied minors — kids who fled trafficking, persecution, neglect, abandonment. Some arrived carrying nothing but the clothes they wore and the name of a relative they hoped was still alive. Congress recognized their vulnerability and built protections around them, including the right to have their cases carefully assessed. The same administration that has been stripping legal protections from the spouses of citizens is now doing the same to children. The piece it is dismantling right now is legal counsel.
I want to say this plainly, the way the tradition I write from requires me to say it: the administration is stripping legal representation from unaccompanied children in order to deport them faster and with less scrutiny. That is not an allegation. That is what the documented record shows. The federal contractor that administers legal services for these kids — the Acacia Center for Justice — has been told the contract ends July 31. The government is refusing to reimburse nearly a hundred legal organizations for $65 million in work already completed unless those organizations agree to hand over unredacted medical evaluations, confidential case files, and sensitive data about the children they represent. Shaina Aber, Acacia’s executive director, called it what it is: “a roadmap for mass deportation of children.”
Let me show you the arithmetic. Elizabeth Young, a former regional deputy chief immigration judge who resigned last year, puts it in numbers anyone can understand: without a lawyer, children win the right to stay in the United States less than ten percent of the time. Immigration judges are nearly a hundred times less likely to grant relief to a child without counsel. Due process, she said, becomes “little more than an illusion.” The administration knows this arithmetic. It is counting on it.
The ultimatum is already collapsing the organizations that do this work. Kids in Need of Defense — founded by Angelina Jolie and Microsoft, with the kind of institutional backing that should make any nonprofit sustainable — announced last month it was canceling its participation as a subcontractor because the government owes it $20 million. In Texas, legal organizations with decades of experience representing immigrant children are on the brink of closure because the reimbursement pipeline has been cut, even as the administration reportedly plans to send unaccompanied children en masse to Texas courts, where the judiciary and state leadership are aligned with the deportation agenda. ICE agents have already tried to enter the offices of legal aid groups serving these children, a move that makes the demand for confidential client files look less like an audit and more like an operation.
The federal officials running this operation reportedly asked Ken Paxton’s office to help represent the children — the attorney general of Texas, one of the administration’s fiercest allies, asked to serve as legal counsel to the kids his state is built to deport. When that door closed, they turned to the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, a small agency tasked with criminal defense, not civil immigration work. Its executive director told them the request would likely violate his mandate. The message in both cases was the same: the administration wants the children in court, it wants them there fast, and it does not care who is — or is not — sitting beside them.
This operation did not arise from secular policy alone. It has been blessed by theology. When the first Trump administration began separating children from their parents at the border, the attorney general of the United States stood before the nation, cited the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, and told Americans that the Bible commanded obedience to the state’s enforcement decisions. The White House press secretary endorsed the reading from the podium. Evangelical leaders — from the pulpit, on television, in the advisory circles that gathered around the president — lined up to defend it. Paul wrote those words to a church in Rome that was about to be devoured by the same empire he told them to submit to. The instruction was meant to protect the vulnerable from reckless defiance, not to license the empire to devour them. To turn those verses into a warrant for taking children from parents and then stripping those children of their lawyers before sending them into court alone is the same operation the Pharisees performed on the Law of Moses: taking the word of God and forging it into a weapon against the very people that word was written to protect.
And that operation did not land in a vacuum. It landed with Catholic votes. The administration that is ending this contract was elected with majority Catholic support — a fact that a column in this tradition cannot soft-pedal or assign to someone else’s ledger. The vice president who distorted the concept of ordo amoris to mean love your own first and the stranger after was offering a reading that Pope Francis corrected in plain language within days — naming the Good Samaritan as the true ordering of Christian love — and that the man who is now Pope Leo XIV publicly called wrong, saying Jesus does not ask us to rank our love for others. But the distortion did its work first. It gave Catholic voters a theologically legible permission slip for the machine that is now processing these children in court without counsel. The bishops of the United States have been among the most courageous voices in American public life on immigration — filing briefs, issuing pastoral letters, sheltering families in parish halls from agents who came to take them — and the reality is that a majority of the Catholic electorate has voted, election after election, for the administrations dismantling those protections. The gap between the teaching Church and the practicing electorate is a failure that belongs to my own house, and I do not get to lay it at the Baptist’s door while the pew I kneel in is full of people who brought the machine to power.
I know what some of my co-religionists are saying, and I will take their concerns seriously before I answer them: the border must mean something. Nations have the right to control who enters. The system cannot accommodate everyone. The USCCB’s own 2003 pastoral, Strangers No Longer, written with the bishops of Mexico, lists national sovereignty as one of five operating principles, and I honor it. But sovereignty is one principle among five. The same letter lists the right to find opportunity at home, the right to migrate when you cannot survive where you are, the right to protection for refugees and asylum seekers, and the right to dignity. The sovereignty principle does not cancel the other four. A reading of that pastoral that lifts up the one and buries the four is not careful biblical interpretation. It is selective use of the text to bless what the machine has already decided to do. And the children standing in court alone next month — some brought by traffickers, some fleeing persecution, some too young to understand what a courtroom is — are not abstractions of border sovereignty. They are small persons being moved through a legal process designed to reject them. The question the gospel puts to us is not whether the border means something. It is whether we are permitted to build a machine that processes children this way and call it justice.
The Torah commands the love of the stranger thirty-six times — more than any other commandment — and grounds that command in memory: you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Every American family has a land of Egypt in its past. The Irish fleeing famine, the Jews fleeing pogroms, the Vietnamese fleeing the fall of Saigon, the Salvadorans fleeing death squads — every one of those ancestors would have been stripped of counsel and stood alone in court under the logic now operative. The children now being sent into court alone are doing what our own ancestors did. The machine we are building is the one our ancestors prayed their children would never face.
Pope Francis named the condition at Lampedusa in 2013: “the globalization of indifference.” He was standing at the edge of the Mediterranean, where bodies were washing ashore, and he told the world that we had become “used to the suffering of others.” The administration’s contract deadline is not a budget decision. It is the globalization of indifference made operational. It is a choice to strip children of the one person in the courtroom whose job is to tell their story, and then to call the resulting deportation order due process.
The door of return is open. The contract does not have to expire. The $65 million in completed work can be reimbursed. The demand for confidential files can be withdrawn. The organizations that represent these children can be funded rather than crushed. These are administrative decisions, not laws of nature. They can be reversed by the same people who made them, and they can be reversed today.
The Christ of the Gospel of Matthew did not say “I was a stranger and you deported me without a hearing.” He said “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” He said it to people who would be judged by whether they recognized him in the face of the least of these. The children who will walk into immigration court alone next month are the least of these. They are the stranger. They are, whether this country can see it or not, Christ.
The administration can stop. The contract can be renewed. The children can have their lawyers back. I am asking, in the name of the God who commanded the love of the stranger and the Christ who said whatever you do to the least of these you do to me: let them have their lawyers back.