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Inside an immigration court in lower Manhattan, the faces of migrant children – some as young as three – have been beamed on to a video screen throughout the summer as they faced deportation hearings. Most appeared virtually. Some sat around desks in a classroom, others bounced on bunk beds or rocked in chairs inside small offices or storage closets.
Detained in nearby shelters for unaccompanied minors in New York, the vast majority did not have lawyers as they appeared before the court.
Internal federal regulations have long barred deportation proceedings from moving ahead when children don’t have legal representation, and federal law requires the government to make every effort to fund those attorneys or assure pro bono counsel. But inside the courtroom of Judge Lisa W Ling, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prosecutor appointed to the court by Donald Trump in 2018 during his first term as US president, none of those safeguards seemed to matter.
Over a series of hearings observed by the City Reporter in July, Ling peppered unrepresented children with questions that could profoundly affect their cases: “Why did you come to the United States?” “Are you afraid of returning to your country?” “Were you able to go to school?” “When you left Guatemala, were you running away or afraid of anything?”
Sometimes the small fluorescent-lit courtroom was empty other than the City Reporter, Judge Ling at the front of the room in a black robe and, beside her, her legal assistant, as kids faces popped up on screen. Other times there were one or two other observers in the room.
When Ling began to question Evan, a preteen boy from Guatemala with side-swept dark bangs, a child advocate tried to intervene. Child advocates are assigned to particularly sensitive cases, but they aren’t lawyers. The City Reporter has withheld Evan’s full name and the full names of other children described.
“Your honor, if I may, we understand the court’s wish to expedite proceedings,” said Nicole Guerrero of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. Evan, she pointed out, “is not represented and does not understand immigration law”.
“Without legal representation, he is denied a full and fair hearing,” Guerrero warned.
The judge pressed on regardless.
Ling oversees what is known as the “detained juvenile docket”, where all the children held in shelters overseen by the federal office of refugee resettlement (ORR) in New York City, adjacent to Long Island to the east and the lower Hudson valley to the north, must appear in their deportation proceedings. Of more than 300 cases involving detained children before her between late June and the end of July, just a quarter had attorneys assigned to them, according to court records.
But what is happening in Ling’s courtroom is not unusual and such processes are already playing out across the country – and about to kick into overdrive. On 31 July, the Trump administration will allow a $356m-a-year contract to provide such legal services to expire, barring any last-minute agreements. As a result, about 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children facing deportation across the US, including 1,300 in New York, will lose federally funded legal services.
“It’s an all-out war on their due process rights,” said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, the non-profit that oversees the nationwide contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is responsible for the care of unaccompanied migrant children. From the federal contract, Acacia then subcontracts with dozens of legal service providers across the country, nine of which are based in New York.
“We’re going to see a lot of kids railroaded into taking voluntary departure, AKA self-deport, even where their protection needs are acute and where they would be facing real danger to their lives in their countries of origin,” Aber said.
Legal service funding under attack
For decades, across Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government funded legal service providers, in accordance with a 2008 law that required HHS to “ensure to the greatest extent practicable” that minors had legal representation in deportation proceedings.
But that funding came under attack last spring when the Trump administration attempted to cancel Acacia’s contract. A federal judge intervened, requiring the administration to continue the contract temporarily.
Then late last year, HHS started delaying payments and requested new information about the children that Acacia represents. Advocates decried the request as a breach of attorney-client privilege, and the millions in stalled payments are the subject of another ongoing lawsuit.
This week’s funding cliff comes at a perilous time for unaccompanied migrant children. They’re staying longer in federal shelters, as the Trump administration has found ways to delay their release from detention – from where it is much more difficult to find legal support. At the same time, the executive office of immigration review (EOIR), which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, has sped up proceedings for unaccompanied children.
That haste was apparent inside Judge Ling’s courtroom. Instead of adjourning cases for several months at a time, which attorneys said had been the norm, she scheduled children to return to court every two or three weeks.
An analysis of immigration court records by the City Reporter shows a spike in the number of deportation hearings for unaccompanied minors detained in New York this year, with 1,400 to date, already surpassing the total for 2025.
“They’re cutting off access to lawyers for these children, but they need lawyers now more than ever,” said Beth Baltimore, the deputy director of the Legal Services Center at the Door, one of nine New York non-profits with an expiring federal contract. “It was never a system that a child could navigate alone, but now it’s so much more complex and so much more difficult.”
With the wholesale cessation of all federal funding for their legal representation, advocates warn that deportations of vulnerable children are all but certain to climb.
“The feeling that we’ve been getting in the community that there’s a bit of a closing in and targeting of children in a way that we didn’t see under the first Trump administration,” Emily Norman, the regional director of Kids in Need of Defense (Kind) who oversees its New York City office.
Asked about the end of the Acacia contract, an unnamed spokesperson for HHS said the agency had asked the group for additional data on the people it represents, which the non-profits declined to provide.
“The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) works to ensure the safety, well-being, and appropriate care of all children in its custody,” a statement read. “ORR remains fully compliant with legal and regulatory obligations and does not act in any way that could dissuade a child from seeking appropriate legal relief.” The ORR is an agency within HHS.
Other protections for unaccompanied children ignored
Apart from federally funded legal services, the EOIR has its own protections in place for children who arrived in the US unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian who can care for them there.
Immigration judges are not supposed to “accept an admission of removability” from any child without an “attorney or legal representative, a near relative, legal guardian, or friend”.
That admission would happen at what are called “pleadings”, an early step towards deportation during which the justice department lays out its case against a migrant, and an immigration judge determines whether or not the migrant could be deported. If pleadings can’t go ahead for an unaccompanied child without a lawyer, none of the other steps in the deportation process can happen, including a deportation order, Aber of the Acacia Center for Justice explained.
“The regulations are very clear,” said Aber.
But child advocates and attorneys in New York say that practice changed several months ago, when, for one, Ling appeared to stop following the department’s internal guidance, moving ahead on the cases of detained children whether or not they had attorneys.
Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the EOIR, said the agency does not comment on the decisions of individual judges and called immigration judges independent adjudicators who make their own decision on a case-by-case basis. The EOIR did not make Ling available for interview.
The EOIR, according to the government’s website, “administers the immigration court system, which decides whether an individual charged with violating immigration law should be allowed to stay in the country or not”.
US immigration courts come under the Department of Justice within the executive branch of the US government, as opposed to the judicial branch.
Advocates say that what is happening in Ling’s courtroom is taking place in other courtrooms where unaccompanied children appear.
Aber said judges across the country started moving ahead in cases involving children with no lawyers this spring, as the EOIR also started scheduling unaccompanied children on huge “mega master” daily dockets, and decreasing the time kids had in between hearings.
Mattingly declined to comment on any policy shift related to unrepresented children more broadly.
Children face deportation with little help
During a recent hearing, an attorney with Catholic Charities named Tonya Putnam, acting as “friend of the court” – someone who assists proceedings but does not legally represent any client – repeatedly interjected, telling Judge Ling she was out of step with current EOIR regulations.
“Per regulations, the court should not take pleadings from an unrepresented child,” Putnam told the court, urging Ling to pause proceedings in the case of a Guatemalan teen named Ambrosio, who appeared via video from a room lined with butterfly wallpaper and book shelves.
“The court properly took pleadings,” Ling replied, giving Ambrosio, who was in a shelter and doesn’t have a lawyer, three weeks to fill out an asylum application in English.
The same exchange repeated in the case of Nilmar, a boy with shaggy bangs wearing a beaded necklace, who looked around the age of 15.
“Per regulations, an unrepresented child should not have pleadings taken without counsel,” Putnam repeated.
Ling continued the proceeding anyway, asking Nilmar if he was afraid of returning to Guatemala, to which he responded: “No.” Ling repeated the question several times, with Nilmar responding negatively each time.
“Why did you come to the United States?” Ling then asked.
“To have a better life,” the child responded, through a interpreter.
Nilmar’s admission to the court during pleadings meant one of the only outlets of relief available to him while detained, applying for asylum, would no longer be an option.
Putnam tried to interject. “Your honor, as a friend of the court, I’m not sure the child understands the implication of what he’s saying,” she said.
Ling asked Nilmar if he understood what she was saying, to which he replied he had, and again asked if he would feel unsafe returning to Guatemala, to which he replied again that he wasn’t afraid.
“I don’t know if you can give me some extra time to fill out what I was given, the asylum,” Nilmar asked through the translator.
Ling said it didn’t appear he was eligible for asylum, and began to explain that she would grant him voluntary departure and he would have to leave the country by 19 November this year or have to pay a fine of up to $5,000.
“Can you give me more time to find a lawyer?” he asked.
“Unfortunately I can’t do this any further. This is the eighth time that we’ve adjourned your case,” Ling said. “The court has given you plenty of time to find a lawyer.”
Nilmar ran his fingers through his hair and fidgeted in his seat, then asked Ling what would happen in his case and if he would be released to his sponsor in the US, an uncle. She replied the court had nothing to do with his potential release to an uncle.
“This court is granting you voluntary departure,” Ling replied, which allows someone to leave the US voluntarily and at their own expense if they want to avoid a formal deportation order that comes with a much longer wait abroad before someone can request permission to return. “I wish you all the best,” Ling added.
Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw a non-detained juvenile docket at immigration court at 290 Broadway before she was fired last fall, said piecing together whether a child has a potential asylum claim can take time, as children may be the victims of trafficking or abuse.
“It’s just so wrong just to ask a kid generically, ‘Are you afraid of going back?’” Cassin, who now serves as legal director for Immigrant Children Advocates Relief Effort, said. “Maybe they don’t understand what that really means. Maybe they don’t want to admit it in that context. Maybe they were abused by their own parents, and they don’t want to say it.”
Children with attorneys aren’t typically asked in immigration court if they’re afraid to return to their countries of origin, because their lawyer would have already screened them to determine what type of immigration relief they might be eligible for, including asylum, advocates said.
For the unrepresented children who told Ling they were afraid to return to their countries, Ling set tight timelines of two or three weeks for them to fill out asylum applications in English, a difficult task for an adult in their native tongue, let alone a child who doesn’t speak the language.
On a recent morning, a 17-year-old from Guatemala named Xavi sat with his head resting on his hands as he listened to his deportation proceedings through a Spanish translator. He’d spent months trying to reunite with his brother in New York after crossing the border and being held in a youth shelter in the Bronx.
Ling gave the boy three weeks to fill out an application for asylum in English, though Xavi had no lawyer.
Sarah Caspari, a child advocate assigned to the case, begged the judge for more time, given the lack of an attorney and the fact that, she noted, “Xavi does not speak, read or write in English.”
“This case will be proceeding,” Ling replied.
In other cases, Ling scolded children who hadn’t finished their asylum applications on the deadline she’d given them, as she did with Abimal, also from Guatemala.
“I told you at the last hearing, with or without a lawyer you had to submit the application,” Ling stated. “So why wasn’t it done?”
“I haven’t done it yet, I wanted to have a lawyer,” Abimal replied through a Spanish interpreter.
“With or without a lawyer you have to file it,” Ling warned.
Then she said: “I’m going to give you one more week.”
Haidee Chu contributed additional reporting
This is a co-publish with the City Reporter. The City Reporter is an independent non-profit newsroom dedicated to serving the people of New York
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