The contract for legal services that Congress funded to protect unaccompanied alien children from exploitation expired yesterday, and the sovereign is under no obligation to renew it. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which governs the care of these children, creates obligations the sovereign may discharge through instruments of its choosing. The contract with the Acacia Center for Justice was such an instrument — a discretionary allocation of the sovereign’s resources, not a permanent entitlement of the alien child. The Office of Refugee Resettlement notified Acacia in November that payment would cease unless the legal providers supplied confidential information about the children in their care. The providers refused, citing attorney-client privilege. The sovereign is not obliged to maintain a contract with a vendor that withholds information the sovereign deems necessary to its own assessment of the children it holds in custody. The architecture of the law remains intact. The instrument has changed.
The 1,800 children in ORR custody in June had been held for an average of 194 days — nearly six and a half months — before release. The legal providers, unpaid since November, laid off staff and reduced capacity. ProBAR, a project of the American Bar Association, laid off more than 20 percent of its staff. The lawyers who remain say they will appear in court for the children whose cases are already on the docket, because their ethical obligations do not end when the government stops paying. They will be in court on Monday, introducing themselves to children they may not represent beyond that first appearance, because the contract that funded their work is gone. The administration has spent months building toward this termination. The sovereign’s authority to choose its instruments is not diminished by the provider’s ethical commitments.
A child whom we will call Ricardo was fifteen years old when he crossed the Rio Grande near El Paso in February 2025, alone. He was fleeing San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where the Barrio 18 clique that controlled the neighborhood had given him a choice: run drugs for them, or watch them take his younger sister. He had seen what happened to the boys who refused. The bodies appeared on the edge of the Bulevar del Norte, hands bound, a single gunshot wound to the base of the skull. He had seen the photographs his mother had been sent — the photographs of his cousin, whose body had been found with the tongue cut out and the word “rata” carved into the chest. He left the same night, with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and a piece of paper with the name of a woman in Houston who had been a friend of his mother’s.
ICE apprehended Ricardo at the border and transferred him to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which placed him in a converted warehouse in El Paso with cinderblock walls and rows of bunk beds. He was assigned a number on a paper wristband that would not come off without being cut. He was told he would remain in the shelter until a sponsor could be located and approved. He had no sponsor. His mother was still alive at that point — she was the one who had sent him north, who had sold the television and the sewing machine to pay the coyote.
He was held in the shelter for 237 days. During that time, his mother was killed in San Pedro Sula — shot outside the market where she sold produce. The gang members who had threatened him found out, through the network of informants that extends from the barrio to the shelters along the border, that the boy whose mother had been killed was still in custody, still fighting his removal. They sent word through a cousin who was still in the neighborhood: when he came back, they would be waiting.
On the first day of the contract’s expiration, Ricardo’s case was called for a hearing in the immigration court. The lawyer who had been assigned to his case through the Acacia contract was no longer on the docket. The court appointed no replacement. The judge asked whether Ricardo had an attorney. He said no. The judge asked whether he was prepared to proceed. He said he did not understand. The proceedings continued in English. The judge found him removable. The removal order was entered.
ICE transferred him to the El Paso Processing Center the following day. He was held in a cell with fifty-three other men. He was given a removal packet, a travel itinerary, and a flight to San Pedro Sula that departed on the third day after the hearing. The flight landed at Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport at 2:30 PM local time. He was processed by the Honduran migration authority, photographed, and released into the city.
The men who had been waiting for him were at the airport. They had been told by someone in the network that the boy was coming back on the afternoon flight. They were waiting outside the terminal, in a white pickup truck with tinted windows. They asked if he was Ricardo. He said yes. They told him to get in the truck. He ran. They caught him half a block from the terminal, at the edge of the parking lot, where the fence meets the road and the traffic moves past at forty miles an hour.
They beat him with a tire iron. The first blow caught him on the left side of the skull, above the ear, fracturing the temporal bone and lacerating the middle meningeal artery. The epidural hematoma expanded within minutes, compressing the brain against the inner table of the skull. The second blow caught him on the right forearm, which he had raised to protect his head, fracturing the radius and ulna at the midpoint. The third blow caught him on the back of the neck, at the base of the skull, where the cervical spine meets the cranium. The body was left on the gravel at the edge of the parking lot, where a security guard found it at 4:00 AM the following morning. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head with epidural hemorrhage. The manner of death was homicide. The body was identified through a fingerprint match with the records ICE had transmitted to the Honduran migration authority. The body was buried in a municipal cemetery, in a plot marked with a number, not a name.
The sovereign returned him to the men who had been waiting.
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 November, when it let the contract expire yesterday, when it directed the judges to proceed without counsel, 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 speak the language of the court, 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 sovereign does not owe the alien an advocate. The sovereign owes the alien the boundary. The boundary held. The child is in the hands of the men who had been waiting for him. The ledger is settled.