CHICAGO \u2014 The Trump administration has awarded a $150 million contract to give legal representation to migrant children traveling alone to the U.S. to a small Texas law firm with ties to the administration but little experience in immigration law, prompting legal aid groups who\u2019ve long represented those children to warn that the move could make them vulnerable to deportation.<\/p>\n
The contract to the Houston-based Burke Law Group comes as the Trump administration ramps up its mass deportation campaign across the country and after the administration last week let a key contract with a network of legal groups working with immigrant children around the country expire with no replacement. The providers have increasingly raised worries that vulnerable children won’t have the experienced legal help they need at a time when the administration is intensifying efforts to remove people from the country.<\/p>\n
Michael Lukens, who heads the Amica Center, called the idea that the administration had given the sole-source contract to the Texas firm \u201cupsetting and shocking.”<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really does forebode a situation where children are going to get no meaningful due process, no meaningful day in court. We cannot have a random law firm entrusted to take care of children,\u201d Lukens said.<\/p>\n
The groups said the contract announced Tuesday only applies to the children currently held in government-run shelters and that the government would need to issue another contract covering services for migrant children who live outside the shelter system. Lukens said there are currently about 1,800 children living in shelters, and roughly 22,000 live outside with sponsors, such as family members.<\/p>\n
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the government agency responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children, did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration announced late Tuesday that they were hiring the Houston-based Burke to provide legal services to unaccompanied children. The year-long contract starts August 15.<\/p>\n
Only two of the 25 lawyers listed on the firm\u2019s website on Wednesday morning claim relevant experience in immigration law in their biographies.<\/p>\n
Many of the others at the firm are corporate lawyers with ties to conservative causes and to President Trump. The firm\u2019s founder, Marcella Burke, served in Trump\u2019s first administration as a lawyer in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.<\/p>\n
Others on its roster include Justin Shubow, the leading supporter of Trump\u2019s efforts to require federal buildings to adhere to classical and traditional architectural styles, and a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Prominent conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro is listed as a \u201csenior counsel.\u201d<\/p>\n
The firm and its founder, Marcella Burke, didn\u2019t immediately return messages seeking comment.<\/p>\n
The notice says Burke\u2019s contract is a \u201csingle source cooperative agreement,\u201d which means the administration picked the firm without a competitive bidding process. It did not offer a justification for bypassing standard bidding rules.<\/p>\n
Migrant children alone are viewed as especially vulnerable because of their age and are usually entrusted to U.S. government care. There are various legal protections that apply to them once they\u2019re in the U.S., including the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which requires the government to facilitate legal representation for children put into deportation proceedings.<\/p>\n
That representation until recently was carried out by a network of nearly 100 legal aid providers across the country. The legal aid providers go into the shelters and provide know-your-rights trainings to children there and can directly represent them in court proceedings.<\/p>\n
But last Friday marked the last day of that contract and, until late Tuesday, it wasn’t clear if a new contract would be put in place and, if it was, who would do the work.<\/p>\n
On top of the contract uncertainty, the legal aid providers say they’ve been struggling to get repaid for work they have already done since last November. The groups say the administration is asking for detailed information about their clients that they say they’re not ethically able to provide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO \u2014 The Trump administration has awarded a $150 million contract to give legal representation to migrant children…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[557,56,58,57,101440,27],"class_list":["post-398967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-associated-press","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-houston-what-you-need-to-know","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}