President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is in talks with the Texas Attorney General’s Office about taking over representation of unaccompanied minor children, sources have confirmed.
It’s a move some advocates say appears to be a step toward mass deportation.
Last month, high-ranking officials in Ken Paxton’s office contacted the Texas Indigent Defense Commission about the possibility of taking over representation of children in detention facilities administered by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement across the state.
The U.S. Department of Health And Humans Services, which leads refugee resettlement office, did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
But Scott Ehlers, executive director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, confirmed the small agency was asked if it could take over representation. The commission largely funds county-level programs for low-income representation, however, and Ehlers said he informed Paxton’s office that it has neither the statutory authority nor the expertise for such a program.
The Indigent Defense Commission represented adult immigrants arrested under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star for state criminal charges.
“We’ve never done anything with the immigration courts,” Ehlers said.
Should such a change occur, it would upend decades of representation through contracts facilitated by national nonprofits, which cascade down to local ones like American Gateways, San Antonio-based Advokato and the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project.
The Trump administration has attempted to kill funding for representing unaccompanied youth who crossed into the country since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term. The government was sued over the attempt and lost in court. The funding has been continued through a series of three-month contracts since last spring, and is set to expire on July 31. According to multiple service providers, they have received no details on whether it will be continued.
The concern for advocates is that all unaccompanied minor children in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody – as many as 2,000 – will be uprooted to Texas, which has signaled a willingness to accede to Trump’s agenda.
“Reports of the Trump administration’s latest proposal to move detained immigrant children to Texas are deeply troubling, said Shaina Aber, executive director of Acacia Center for Justice, which currently administers the national contract. ‘What the administration appears to be proposing would involve uprooting vulnerable children from the lawyers and advocates they are working with, requiring them to start their cases over in a state where there is no independent oversight of the care children receive, to set up a rubber-stamp system for a mass child deportation agenda.’
Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to stop licensing and monitoring facilities with unaccompanied minors in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody in 2021. It is one of only two states that does not license such care facilities.
Advocates such as Aber worry the move could mark a resumed escalation in attempts to deport unaccompanied minors. The administration attempted to extrajudicially deport more than 70 Guatemalan children last Labor Day weekend. The children had been spirited from across the country to Harlingen, before the move was stopped by a judge who later permanently barred the removals.
Some have connected the potential move to a letter sent to the Secretary of Health and Human Services by Sen. Ron Wyden last month. The Oregon Democrat warned the secretary he had received “credible information” that HHS was moving to remove 500 unaccompanied children from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Afghanistan from the country without court hearings.
“The new information I obtained leads me to believe that the Department is laying the groundwork for another lawless deportation effort,” Wyden wrote in the June 24 letter.
The children he identified were ones who had no viable sponsor and had been in federal custody for at least 180 days.
This article originally published at Trump administration in talks with Texas over lawyers for migrant children.