The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center said Tuesday that it's ending legal representation for more than 500 unaccompanied immigrant children after the federal contract that funded its work expired at the end of July.
The loss of federal funding leaves hundreds of vulnerable children in Michigan to navigate the U.S. immigration court system on their own, the center said.
The Immigrant Rights Center is a statewide nonprofit legal aid organization that has represented unaccompanied minors in federal custody in Michigan since 2017. With the termination of the federal contract, MIRC said it's being forced to make difficult decisions regarding which cases it can afford to maintain.
Out of nearly 950 active children’s cases currently on the center's docket, more than half will have to be closed due to the loss of funding, the organization said.
The legal services contract was administered through the Acacia Center for Justice, a national nonprofit that passed federal funding from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement to local legal providers like the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the refugee resettlement office, told the Guardian last month that the office offered the Acacia Center a new contract, but the center turned it down.
"ORR offered Acacia the opportunity to receive a second bridge contract that included requirements to provide data on whom they represent and to bill the government when they submit applications for immigration relief," the agency said, according to the Guardian.
Acacia said the contract would have required attorneys to share confidential client data.
The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center echoed those concerns. "It included terms that would require attorneys to violate attorney-client privilege and their ethical duties of confidentiality to clients," said Ana Devereaux, MIRC's senior managing attorney. "That's something that no attorney can enter into while maintaining their law license."
Devereaux added that immigration court is extraordinarily complex, even for adults. For children, she said, navigating court procedures without an attorney is virtually impossible.
As a result, Deveraux said, unrepresented children will end up "facing deportation and being forced to return to situations that they had fled usually for their safety."
"So many of our clients have suffered abuse, abandonment or neglect or persecution in their home country, which is why they've come here to seek the protection that does exist under the law," said Devereaux. "But without an attorney, we don't expect they would be able to successfully acquire that protection."
Despite the termination of federal funding, MIRC said it will continue representing more than 400 unaccompanied immigrant children using emergency funds. The organization said its other immigration programs will remain active at its offices in Detroit, Ypsilanti, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and Lansing.
