The Trump administration has sent twenty-six thousand migrant children to immigration court without lawyers.
You are a parent. You are nineteen years old and you sent your son north because the gang that ran the streets outside his school had already beaten him once and told him they would do it again. He made it as far as El Paso. He was detained at the border. He is in federal custody in a state whose name he cannot pronounce. He will have an immigration hearing in a courtroom with five adults and no one at the table whose job it is to help him. He will be asked to remember dates, to name the people who threatened him, to prove the well-foundedness of his fear of return. He is eleven years old. He is the defendant’s witness and he is also the defendant.
The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement ran a contract that placed lawyers with roughly a hundred providers around the country to represent these children. That contract expired at the end of July. There was no replacement in place. $65 million owed to the providers was never paid. An interim contract now covers the gap; it expires in December. Beyond December, the administration has offered no plan. A Houston firm with close ties to the president — the Burke Law Group — was offered $150 million to take the work. The firm declined. The agency that hands out these contracts put out a statement and would not say a word about why. The children still have no lawyers. The administration had months to ensure representation and chose — by action and by failure to act — to leave them undefended. We can dress the choice in bureaucratic language: contract expiring, solicitation process, fiscal discipline, transition. The choice is what it is. Twenty-six thousand children, no counsel.
I have sat at kitchen tables with families trying to understand what a notice to appear means. I have watched a grandmother weep because her grandson’s hearing was moved and no one could tell her why. I have carried a Bible to a hospital room and then to a courtroom in the same week and tried to explain, in the same voice, what the gospel meant for a young woman whose first language was not mine and whose first judge would be a stranger. None of that work is glamorous. All of it is what the lawyer does for a child who cannot speak for himself. The administration has chosen to take that lawyer away.
The Hebrew psalmist named these children before there was an immigration court. “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless,” Psalm 82 says; “maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” The psalmist is not writing about exceptions or hardships or the difficult trade-offs of border security. He is writing about the obligation of a state that claims the name of God. To maintain the right of the fatherless is the work. A child standing alone before a judge who holds the power to send them back into the danger their family was fleeing — this is the wicked hand.
The Torah says the same thing in a different idiom, over and over, in verse after verse. That the ger, the resident alien, the stranger who lives with you, is yours to love. You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing; you shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The memory of having been the stranger is the moral mechanism. Every American family has a “land of Egypt” in its past. Jesus, reading the same scripture, put it in a courtroom. “See that you do not despise one of these little ones.” “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” In the parable the least of these includes the stranger. In the parable the least of these includes the child. In the parable the least of these is the one whose counsel has been removed.
Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. He had been a careful man — careful of the officers of his country’s military, careful of the wealthy families of his archdiocese, careful of his own training in the theology of order. Then his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who had been organizing peasants in Aguilares, was murdered on the road with two companions, shot through the head by anonymous gunmen. Romero walked to the pulpit the next Sunday and read the gospel at his own funeral. He called, by name, the officers and the men of the death squads. He read the soldiers’ own catechism oath and said the oath came first: No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. He said it again on the night of March 23, 1980, on the country’s only Catholic radio station: In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression. The next day, while he was lifting the chalice at Mass, a single bullet through the chest.
I have been reading Romero in the parish house, in the broken chair by the window, every Lent since I was twenty-three. He was a bishop who decided that the children in his city were worth his life. He decided that the bishops who had served the wealthy and stayed quiet about the killings were wrong. He said what he had not said in twenty years of priestly quiet. The United States in 2026 is not El Salvador in 1980. But the structure that lets a state decide which children’s lives are worth defending in court is the structure that killed Romero’s priests and his catechists, and Romero would have called it pecado social — social sin, the evil that is built into a structure rather than committed by any one person. Twenty-six thousand children facing removal hearings without counsel is the structure’s present testimony. Whether we have a Burke Law Group or an interim group or no group at all, the structure is what matters. The structure is the administration letting the contracts die.
The American pope, Pope Leo XIV, has named this. In plain English, in interview after interview, he has called the current treatment of immigrant children inhuman. He has called migrants privileged witnesses of hope. He has said, in language too plain for the political class to keep pretending it didn’t hear — in November 2025, calling out the treatment of migrants in the United States: When people are living good lives — and many of them in the United States for 10, 15, 20 years — to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least, is not acceptable. He is the former Robert Prevost of Chicago, an Augustinian who ran the Vatican department that oversees bishop appointments. He knows what he is saying. He is saying what the U.S. bishops said in 2003, in Strangers No Longer, written jointly with the Mexican bishops’ conference — that the human rights and human dignity of undocumented migrants should be respected, that nations have a right to control their borders but children have a right to counsel when their liberty is at stake. There is no honest Catholic debate about whether what is happening to these children is right or wrong. The teaching is unanimous. The dissent is from the American political class.
We owe what our own communities have helped to make worse. The contract that covered a hundred providers was not given to us by a benevolent government; it was won, over years, by Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the Young Center, and others who did the work because the work was theirs. We did not build that infrastructure. We benefited from it. Many of us have stayed quiet when the language of enforcement hardened and the people who enforce it stopped being asked to keep families whole. I have to admit, before naming this: our Catholic Worker houses have been the defense for a hundred years; the legal-aid offices that just lost their federal contracts have been the defense for decades; the Jesuit Refugee Service and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and the parish priests who drive to the detention centers have done what the state did not do. But the Catholic laity in this country has been told for forty years that immigration is a Catholic issue and has often decided that it is somebody else’s issue; the bar has done less than it could have; the contracts that just expired depended on lawyers willing to take federal contracts at federal rates the federal government has not always paid. When the administration let the contract expire without a replacement, we let it happen with us in the room. The administration is the proximate cause. The complicity is older than any present administration.
What a humane immigration policy looks like in this small corner is not mysterious. It would not, for one thing, hand a $150 million contract to a firm with no immigration experience. It would not let the legal-aid contracts lapse. It would fund counsel for every unaccompanied child at every removal hearing, as a matter of right. It would treat the children as children — which means not putting them in adult detention facilities, not fast-tracking their cases past the point where a lawyer can build a credible-fear case, and not dismantling the apparatus designed to make their day in court a fair one. It would look like the hundred-provider network that was working, paid in full and renewed on time. It would look like representation for every unaccompanied child from the first hour in custody. It would look like a government that treats the right to counsel as something the Constitution already provides and acts accordingly. None of this requires invention. It requires the will to keep doing what was working.
The door of return is open. You can pay the contractors what you owe, restore the network, and require any future contract holder to demonstrate immigration experience before signing. You can ensure the December interim does not become another cliff. You can read your own announcement back to yourself and notice what is missing. The work is not hard. The will is.
Psalm 82 does not end with the demand. It ends with a warning: “You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High. Nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall like any prince.” Power that denies justice to the fatherless is not preserved by its denial. It is stored up for itself. The administration has a season to choose differently. The children do not have a season. They have a December.
The boy in the facility is asleep by now, on a cot that is not his own, in a room that does not sound like his home. He will wake up tomorrow and the courtroom will still have its date on the calendar. He will still not have a lawyer. The structure that Romero saw in El Salvador in 1977 is the structure, and we are still deciding whether to look at it.