June 6, 2025
Trump Wants Thousands of Migrant Children to Represent Themselves in Court
By Phoebe Grandi
The administration’s funding cuts would force unaccompanied migrant children, from infants to toddlers to teenagers, to navigate complex and punishing legal procedures entirely alone.
he notice from the Department of the Interior arrived in the middle of the workday. Alexa Sendukas, a managing attorney at the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, opened her inbox to a notice directing her to stop working immediately. The order was spare. In three paragraphs, the Trump administration halted all work under a government contract funding legal representation for unaccompanied migrant children. “The stop-work order,” the letter read, “is being implemented due to causes outside of your control.”
The order, sent on February 18, interrupted a busy week at GHIRP, with attorneys filing asylum applications ahead of an impending deadline. Harris County in Texas, home to Houston, receives the highest number of unaccompanied children in the country. The day the order was issued, one of Sendukas’s colleagues had just returned from representing two unaccompanied children in immigration court, two other attorneys had hearings the next day, and paralegals were still at a shelter providing legal orientation to newly arrived children.
