Attorneys representing immigrant children will be in court again Thursday, asking a judge to force the government to pay out millions of dollars for work they’ve done for the program this year.
A network of almost 100 legal aid groups represent around 20,000 immigrant children alone in the U.S., part of a program put together and funded by Congress.
But aid groups part of the program say they’ve not been paid since November. They're going to court this week to try and recoup the roughly $65 million that’s been held up by Health and Human Services, the agency that is responsible for immigrant children in government custody.
Meanwhile, the contract to do that work expired July 31, and has not been renewed.
Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu is the deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the group representing unaccompanied kids in Arizona. She says they have around 300 pending asylum cases for children. Going forward, new clients will have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
"As our current cases ramp up, we have to build capacity for that, and that means that more work is needed in order to accept a case,” she said during a press call Wednesday.
But Avila-Cimpeanu said for some aid groups, losing federal funding means taking new clients isn’t an option at all.
A notice posted on the Federal Register this week details a $150 million government contract with Burke Law Group to represent unaccompanied immigrant children.
The small Texas firm is focused on “environmental, litigation and corporate counsel,” according to its site. As the AP reports, one of firm's co-founder, Marcella Burkey, is a former Trump appointee to the EPA and the Department of the Interior.
As first reported by Politico, Burke Law Group’s website did not originally list immigration law in its fields of practice, though it has since been added to the specialties of two of the attorneys part of the firm.
Michael Lukens is the executive director of the Acacia Center for Immigrant Rights, which held the contract with HHS that expired July 31st and doled out funding to smaller groups like the Florence Project.
He says the government has demanded sensitive data about the children that is protected by attorney-client privilege.
“If Burke Law is going to do shelter work, and that’s a few thousand kids, there’s still another 22,000 children who are not in shelter, who also are served under this program,” he said. “I truly believe that whoever signs contracts with HHS is going to agree in their contract to turn over this data.”
The notice, which officially publishes Thursday, says Burke Law Group “would provide legal orientation, legal consultation, and attorney-of-record representation services for eligible UACs while they remain in ORR care,” along with referral support for legal resources when children are released from custody.
Avila-Cimpeanu says the Florence Project worries their clients will be funneled to Texas, making it harder to continue their cases already underway in state court — a process she says is often required before a child can receive relief in immigration court.
“That is something else that we see lacking in this law firm, which doesn’t seem to have particularly strong experience in juvenile immigration law…I don’t see anything that indicates they’re able to represent in state courts across the country,” she said. “I just want to be clear — children are going to be sent back to harm, children are going to die, because of this process."
Neither Health and Human Services nor Burke Law Firm responded to questions about the new contract.
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The ruling comes a day after news broke of the government’s plan to offer legal aid to detained immigrant children through a $150 million contract Burke Law Group — a small Texas-based firm with a co-founder who is a former Trump appointee. -
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