The sovereign’s authority over the alien within the territory is plenary. The Constitution vests Congress with the power to establish “an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” and Congress has exercised that power through the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which together constitute the legal architecture governing the care and disposition of unaccompanied alien children. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, is charged by statute with the care of minors who enter the United States without a parent or guardian. The legal-services contract — administered since 2023 by the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit formed for that purpose — is an instrument of that custody. It is not a permanent entitlement of the alien child. It is a discretionary allocation of the sovereign’s resources, terminable at the sovereign’s pleasure.
The administration has spent months building toward this termination. The sovereign is not obligated to provide counsel to those who enter the territory without authorization, and the sovereign is under no obligation to maintain a contract it judges to have served its purpose. The prosecutor’s letter objects that the fast-track procedure risks endangering trafficking victims. But it mistakes the nature of the authority under which the sovereign acts. The sovereign does not bargain with itself over whether to maintain an instrument. The sovereign decides. The instrument is withdrawn.
Immigration judges have issued roughly 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders per month for unaccompanied minors since the President returned to office — about four times the rate from his last term, according to ProPublica. The Acacia Center for Justice reports that the administration stopped paying the contract in December and does not appear to have plans to replace it. The roughly $65 million the federal government owes the contractor is the sovereign’s debt, and the sovereign will settle it or not as the sovereign determines. The contract expires today.
A child who crosses the sovereign’s border without a parent has crossed a boundary the sovereign did not authorize. She is outside the household whose provision the contract represented. The contract’s expiration is the sovereign’s declaration that the household will no longer extend its legal apparatus to children who entered without invitation. The instrument is withdrawn; the boundary remains. The question is not whether the child needs an advocate. The question is whether the advocate is an obligation the sovereign owes to a child who is not its own. The magistrate’s answer is in the docket: 10,000 removal orders a month, the contract unpaid, the deadline today. The sovereign has spoken.
The child whom we will call Luis was fourteen years old when he crossed the Rio Grande in the fall of 2025, alone. He was fleeing La Unión, a town in the department of Olancho, Honduras, where the MS-13 clique that controlled the neighborhood had given him a choice: join, or watch them take his twelve-year-old sister instead. He had seen what happened to the boys who joined — the beatings, the extortion, the bodies left on the road to Juticalpa with the hands bound behind the back and a single gunshot wound to the occipital bone. He had seen what happened to the girls. He told the woman at the shelter in Tapachula that he walked north because the gang had already taken his father and his uncle and he was the only thing left between his sister and the men who wanted her. He was not a trafficker. He was not a gang member. He was a fourteen-year-old boy who had been selected for membership in an organization that does not accept refusals.
An ICE agent apprehended Luis at the border near McAllen, Texas, on the day he crossed. He was processed as an unaccompanied alien child and transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which placed him in a shelter in Brownsville — a converted warehouse with cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights that hummed all night, and bunk beds arranged in rows of twelve. He was assigned a bed, a toothbrush, a towel, and a number. He was told he would remain in the shelter until a sponsor — a parent, a relative, a family friend — could be located and approved to receive him. He had no sponsor. His father was dead. His mother had disappeared three years earlier, and no one in La Unión would say whether she had fled or been taken. His sister was still in Honduras, living with a neighbor who had agreed to hide her for as long as the gang didn’t ask.
Under the law, Luis was entitled to a legal orientation presentation — a group session in which a contracted attorney would explain his rights and obligations in the removal proceedings that would determine whether he could stay. The attorney was an employee of a nonprofit subcontractor funded through the Acacia Center for Justice contract. She met with Luis once, for approximately forty-five minutes, in a room off the shelter’s main hallway, with the door open and a shelter staff member seated at a desk in the corridor. She asked him where he was from, why he had left, whether he had any family in the United States, and whether he had ever been the victim of a crime. He told her about the gang. He told her about his father, his uncle, his sister. He told her he was afraid to go back. She wrote the information on a form and told him someone from the office would follow up. She did not tell him that the contract funding her position had already stopped paying, or that the office was preparing to furlough its attorneys, or that the immigration judge assigned to his case had been directed to accelerate the docket. She did not tell him that the removal order waiting for him at the end of the process would issue without the evidentiary hearing that a lawyer might have secured, or that the forms of relief for which he might have been eligible — Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, asylum, a T visa for trafficking victims — require documentation that a fourteen-year-old child cannot assemble without counsel.
The immigration court held the hearing three weeks later in a courtroom in Harlingen. Luis was not represented. He sat at a table facing the judge, with a Spanish-language interpreter speaking through a headset that did not fit his head. The Department of Homeland Security was represented by an attorney who presented the charging document — the Notice to Appear, which alleged that Luis was a citizen of Honduras present in the United States without authorization — and rested. The judge asked Luis whether he had any application for relief to present. Luis did not understand the question. He said he was afraid to go back. The judge explained that fear, without a formal application supported by evidence, was not a basis on which she could grant relief. She asked whether he had a lawyer. He said no. She asked whether he wanted time to find one. He said yes. She gave him thirty days — the maximum continuance she was permitted to grant under the new docketing directives — and scheduled a second hearing.
During the thirty days, Luis called the number the attorney had given him. The number rang ten times and disconnected. He called again the next day. A recorded message informed him that the office was closed and directed him to call a different number for the Acacia Center for Justice. He called that number. A woman answered and asked for his name, his alien registration number, and his date of birth. She told him that his case had been placed on a waiting list and that someone would contact him if an attorney became available. No one contacted him. The firm that had employed the attorney who met with him in the shelter — Kids in Need of Defense, a legal nonprofit that had subcontractor status under the Acacia contract — announced last month that it would no longer work through the program after accumulating $20 million in unpaid fees. The attorney who had taken his information was no longer employed. The form she had filled out was in a file cabinet in an office that had been vacated.
At the second hearing, Luis appeared alone. He told the judge he had not been able to find a lawyer. The judge asked again whether he had an application for relief. He did not. She asked whether he understood what would happen if she ordered him removed. He said he would be sent back to Honduras. She asked whether he had any reason to fear returning to Honduras beyond what he had already stated. He said that the gang that had killed his father and his uncle would kill him too — that they had told him they would. The judge explained that generalized fear of criminal violence does not, by itself, satisfy the legal standard for asylum in the United States, and that without a lawyer to help him present evidence of a particularized threat tied to a protected ground — race, religion, nationality, political opinion, membership in a particular social group — she could not grant relief. She ordered him removed to Honduras. The order was entered on a Tuesday. He was transferred to a detention facility for juveniles in Karnes City, Texas, where he waited for fourteen days while ICE arranged his deportation flight.
The flight departed from San Antonio International Airport on a Monday morning. Luis was seated in the rear of the aircraft, restrained by a waist chain and handcuffs, with an ICE officer in the seat beside him. He was not sedated. He was not told where in Honduras he would land. He was not told whether anyone from the Honduran government would meet him at the airport. He was not told what would happen if the gang members who had threatened to kill him learned that he had returned. The flight landed at Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport in San Pedro Sula shortly after noon. ICE officers escorted him off the aircraft, removed the restraints, and transferred custody to officials of the Honduran immigration authority. He was given a bag containing the clothes he had been wearing when he crossed the Rio Grande — a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt with a hole in the left sleeve — and twenty dollars in U.S. currency. He was told he could leave. He walked out of the terminal and into the parking lot, where he stood for approximately one hour, waiting for someone who did not come.
Luis made his way back to La Unión over the course of four days, traveling by bus and on foot. He arrived at the neighbor’s house where his sister had been staying. The neighbor told him that the gang had come looking for him two days after he crossed the border — that they had asked where he was, and when the neighbor said she did not know, they had beaten her and taken his sister. The neighbor did not know where his sister was. She had not seen her since the day the men took her. Luis spent the night in the neighbor’s house, sleeping on the floor. The next morning, he walked to the house where his family had lived, at the end of a dirt road on the eastern edge of town. The house was empty. The door was open. The furniture was gone. There was a piece of paper nailed to the wall with a message written in block letters: YOU CAME BACK. YOU BELONG TO US NOW. The gang that had promised to kill him was still there. He had no lawyer, no protection, no plan. He was fourteen years old.
The sovereign withdrew the contract. The attorney vacated the office. The continuance expired. The judge issued the removal order. ICE provided the flight. The Honduran authorities received the child. The gang resumed what the gang had promised.
The child was outside the covenant. He was an alien who had entered the sovereign’s territory without authorization, a boy whose claim upon the household’s legal apparatus was the claim of a stranger, not a son. The sovereign’s authority over the alien is plenary; the sovereign’s obligation to the alien is none. The contract that might have secured him an advocate was an instrument of the sovereign’s discretion, and the sovereign exercised that discretion when it stopped paying in December, when it let the contract expire today, when it directed the judges to accelerate the docket, when it removed the child to the country where the men who wanted him dead were waiting. The removal order was not an error. The absence of counsel was not a failure of the system. The system operated precisely as it was designed to operate. The child who could not assemble the forms, who could not present the evidence, who could not meet the legal standard for the relief he did not know existed, was sorted by the apparatus into the category the apparatus exists to produce: outside, removed, no longer present within the sovereign’s territory, no longer a claim upon the sovereign’s resources.
The magistrate wielded the authority the Constitution confers. The instrument carried the child to the boundary. The boundary held. The child is in the hands of the men who wanted him. The ledger is settled.