The administration is starving 26,000 children’s lawyers to deport the children.
I read that sentence on a Tuesday morning in my kitchen in Fishtown, with a one-year-old on my hip and a four-year-old asking whether the waffle was almost ready, and I had to put my phone down. I had to put it down because the math underneath the sentence is the math I have been doing for four years about my own household, and the recognition that the state is running the same spreadsheet on 26,000 children that I run on my own family was the kind of recognition that makes you stand up from the kitchen table and not sit back down for a while.
Here is the math. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency whose legal mandate is to protect unaccompanied children who arrive in this country without a parent, has spent the last eight months withholding payment from the network of lawyers who represent those children in immigration court. The contract expired Friday. As of Monday, twenty-six thousand children are walking into court without a lawyer. The Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that managed the contract, named it plainly: the government stopped paying after the lawyers refused to hand over confidential, privileged information about the children. The government created the funding crisis. The government manufactured the confidentiality breach as the condition for payment. The government let the contract expire. And twenty-six thousand children will be unrepresented in court this week because their lawyers had the professionalism not to break the law on the government’s orders.
The math on what happens next is known and has been for years. Unaccompanied children with a lawyer win the right to stay in this country at a rate the legal-aid network has memorized because they have had to say it out loud to every reporter who will listen. Without a lawyer, the rate drops below one percent. The state knows this number. The state has known it for the entire two decades since the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 established the federal obligation to these children in the first place. The state is not confused about what it is doing. The state is starving the lawyers into nonrepresentation because nonrepresentation is a deportation guarantee.
The state is also holding these children for an average of 194 days — nearly half a year locked in the bureaucratic machinery of ORR, which held almost 1,800 children in custody in June alone. The state amortizes their childhoods while refusing to pay the legal bill for their defense. A child who has been in federal custody for six months is then sent into immigration court, alone, against a government apparatus whose entire purpose is to remove her, and the state has spent eight months making sure there is no one sitting next to her whose job it is to argue that she should be allowed to stay.
The cultural narrative wants us to debate whether these children are “deserving” of protection. The kitchen-table-spreadsheet version of the same question is whether you are willing to balance a federal budget on a one-percent survival rate for children who crossed a border alone. The 2008 law was the deal. The deal said: a child who arrives in this country without a parent is a child who cannot navigate a deportation proceeding in a foreign language without a lawyer, and the federal government will pay for that lawyer, because the alternative is a child sitting alone in front of a judge whose entire apparatus is arrayed to remove her. The deal was the floor, not the ceiling. The deal was what we owed children who are easily exploited and trafficked. The state is breaking the deal by zeroing out the line item.
The collateral damage is already clearing the floor. ProBAR, one of the legal services projects in the network, laid off more than twenty percent of its staff this week because they have not been paid in eight months. The state is forcing the very people trying to save these children into the same consumer precarity their clients will face on the other side of a deportation order. This is the work/family/capitalism trap in its purest form: the state breaks the safety net, then punishes the workers who try to catch the fall. The staff who lost their jobs at ProBAR last week are now running the same kitchen-table spreadsheet I ran in March 2022 — the one where the math does not add up no matter how many times you run it — except theirs ended in a layoff and mine ended in tears and a column. The state’s preferred ending is the one nobody writes about.
The lawyers will show up anyway. Mickey Donovan, the director of legal services at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said it last week: “We have an ethical responsibility. We can’t just drop a case. If you have a hearing tomorrow, we can’t just not show up because the government decided to stop paying us.” So they will be in court on Monday, unpaid, introducing themselves to children they have not been paid to represent, trying to manually override a deportation machine the government has deliberately left running. They are lawyers performing the corporal works of mercy without the salary, because the alternative is children sitting alone in front of a judge with a ninety-nine percent removal rate.
I have been sitting with the Swift lyric that keeps surfacing in my head, and I have to name it because the catalog is the only English I have for what the state is doing to these children. You’re on your own, kid. That is the title-line. That is the federal mission statement for twenty-six thousand children as of this Monday. The song registers the moment when a young woman recognizes that the validation she was promised is not coming, that the structures that were supposed to catch her were always going to step aside, and that the only safety net left is the lateral one — the friendship bracelets, the group text, the other mothers in the kitchen at midnight. That redemptive turn is the part of the song I keep returning to, because the lawyers at Acacia and Immigrant Defenders and ProBAR are the redemptive turn. They are the friendship bracelets. They are the only reason the kid is not, in fact, on her own.
The other Swift song that keeps surfacing is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” the song that names the labor norm of performing the role while the underlying structure has collapsed, of being miserable and being the best at it, of showing up to the show anyway because the show goes on whether you are paid for it or not. The lawyers showing up to court on Monday are doing the work of that song. The contract is broken. The pay is gone. The professional structure has been deliberately starved. They are performing the role anyway, with a broken heart, because the ethical code that licensed them to practice the role in the first place does not have an exception for what happens when the state turns off the money.
There is a Dorothy Day line I have been turning over in my head, and it is the one that says the Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The cultural narrative wants us to ask whether these children earned the protection. The corporal-works-of-mercy register that I was raised in — the Lansdale register, the St. Stanislaus register, the parish-school register — does not ask that question. The register asks whether the child is hungry, whether the child is sick, whether the child is imprisoned, whether the child is a stranger. The answer to all four questions for twenty-six thousand children on Monday morning is yes. The state is answering no. The state is the only entity in the room that has decided the question of deservingness is even live.
I want to be honest about where I am writing this from. I am writing this from a 1,400-square-foot rowhouse in Fishtown that my husband and I bought in 2022 with the help of a grandmother’s estate and a 7%-interest mortgage. I am writing this as a mother of two children whose legal representation in this country has never been a question that required federal expenditure, whose citizenship is the kind that gets assumed in every room they enter. My children will never face a ninety-nine percent removal rate because the state has decided to stop paying their lawyer. The structural protection my own children enjoy by accident of birth is precisely the protection the state is stripping from twenty-six thousand other children by deliberate policy choice. The kitchen-table-spreadsheet version of that recognition is that some children in this country get a default safety net and some children get a one-percent survival rate, and the difference between the two is not merit. The difference is the state.
The $65 million in unpaid bills is not a backlog. It is the cost of a test the administration administered to itself, to see whether the legal network could be broken by attrition. The staff cuts at ProBAR are the answer the administration was looking for. The cruelty is the point — Adam Serwer’s line, the one that keeps getting recycled because it keeps getting confirmed. But the specific shape of the cruelty also has a purpose. The administration is not merely abandoning children. It is bankrupting the lawyers who represent them, so that when the next child arrives, there is no one to call.
The lawyers are still showing up on Monday. They are showing up because Mickey Donovan is right that you cannot drop a case, and because Dorothy Day is right that the works of mercy are not optional, and because twenty-six thousand children are about to learn what the federal government means when it says their protection is no longer funded. The lawyers are performing the friendship-bracelet turn of the song the state has chosen as their national anthem. The state wrote you’re on your own, kid on the contract and let it expire Friday. The lawyers are the only ones who have decided that the lyric is not yet final. Some debts cannot be written off.
I sat back down at the kitchen table after a while. I poured more coffee. I looked at the waffle. I thought about a girl whose parents were killed in front of her in San Salvador, and a boy whose uncle trafficked him through Guatemala, and a toddler who crossed the river in someone else’s arms, and I thought about what it would mean for the state to look at those children and decide that the line item was the part of the budget that had to go. The math is the math. The deal was the deal. Twenty-six thousand children are not a rounding error. The state is the only one who decided they were.