A New Kind of Lawyer for Migrant Children
HHS has created an in-house legal division to represent unaccompanied children in immigration proceedings. The department promises a professional firewall from the agencies that care for them. Advocates say the real test is whether a government-employed lawyer can remain fully independent when the client’s interests collide with federal policy.
The question is not simply whether a child has a lawyer. It is who the lawyer answers to when the government is also custodian, prosecutor and adjudicator.
At first glance, the change announced by the Department of Health and Human Services looks like a government reorganization: a new office inside the department’s Office of the General Counsel, a new associate general counsel, and a mandate to advise and represent children who arrived in the United States without a parent or legal guardian available to care for them.
But the legal architecture is more consequential than the bureaucratic label suggests. HHS says attorneys in the new Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division, or UACLRD, can enter appearances for individual children before immigration courts and other immigration adjudicators. The same notice says the division is to operate independently from the Administration for Children and Families and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS component responsible for sheltering and placing those children.
That promise of independence is the center of the story. Immigration advocates argue that an attorney’s employer matters when the client is a child in federal custody and the litigation can determine whether the child remains in the United States, reunites with family, seeks asylum or other relief, or departs. HHS, by contrast, has written a structural safeguard directly into the new office’s charter: its lawyers are not to advise ORR or other specified HHS components in matters where they represent an individual child, and any coordination with federal entities must remain consistent with the lawyer’s professional duties to that child.
The official federal term is “unaccompanied alien child.” This article uses “unaccompanied child” or “unaccompanied migrant child” except when referring to official titles or statutory language.
What HHS actually created
The September 29 Federal Register notice gives the new division a remarkably broad client-side mandate. Its attorneys may provide direct legal advice, explain immigration proceedings, rights and responsibilities, and represent individual children as counsel before immigration courts and other appropriate immigration adjudicatory bodies. The notice also says representation may continue through the course of a child’s immigration proceedings when appropriate.
That is different from the ordinary role of agency counsel. Government lawyers typically advise the agency that employs them or litigate on the government’s behalf. Here, HHS is creating a unit whose stated client is the individual child, not ORR. The department says UACLRD performs its functions independently of ORR, the Administration for Children and Families and another HHS legal division that handles children-and-families matters. The notice further says UACLRD cannot provide legal advice or representation to those entities on matters in which the division represents the child.
HHS told The Associated Press that the division will provide another mechanism for direct legal support while federal staff work to reunify children safely with families. The department did not, in AP’s account, provide detailed answers about when the division would be fully operational or whether the government would continue using outside organizations for representation. That uncertainty matters because the in-house office is arriving during a disrupted transition in the long-running network of nonprofit legal providers that historically carried much of this work.
HHS attorney
Under the new model, an HHS lawyer may enter an appearance for the child. The Federal Register says the lawyer’s professional responsibilities run to the child client.
DOJ immigration judge
Immigration courts are part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Judges decide removability and eligibility for forms of relief.
DHS attorney
ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor represents the Department of Homeland Security in removal proceedings and argues the government’s enforcement position.
Children are protected by special rules, but immigration court still is not criminal court
Unaccompanied children occupy a special category in federal immigration law. The Homeland Security Act generally defines the group as children under 18 without lawful immigration status who have no parent or legal guardian in the United States, or no such adult available to provide care and physical custody. Congress later directed HHS in the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to ensure, to the greatest extent practicable and consistent with immigration law, that these children have counsel to represent them in legal proceedings and to protect them from mistreatment, exploitation and trafficking.
That congressional command is important, but it is not the same as the Sixth Amendment right to a court-appointed defense lawyer in a criminal case. Removal proceedings are civil. Justice Department guidance says people in immigration court may obtain counsel at no expense to the government, and its juvenile practice manual says an immigration judge cannot appoint a lawyer or guardian ad litem for an unaccompanied child. For years, the gap has been addressed through a mix of pro bono representation and federally funded nonprofit legal-service networks.
HHS’s current regulations go further than a simple referral list. Section 410.1309 of Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations requires legal orientation for a child in ORR custody in the child’s native or preferred language and in an age-appropriate manner. The regulation says the orientation is to be delivered by an independent legal-service provider with appropriate qualifications and experience. It also requires a confidential legal consultation on a defined timetable, and it allows ORR, subject to appropriations and its determinations, to fund direct immigration representation when pro bono counsel is not practicable.
Independence is a practice, not a line on an org chart
Critics of the new division are focusing less on whether federal lawyers can ever represent private clients and more on the specific incentives surrounding these cases. Public defenders are government-paid lawyers who routinely oppose government prosecutors in criminal court, and federal law contains other examples of lawyers paid by public institutions while owing duties to an individual client. So the fact that a lawyer receives a government paycheck does not, standing alone, establish a conflict that makes representation impossible.
The concern is instead about control. Who decides whether to seek asylum, pursue Special Immigrant Juvenile classification, request a continuance, contest a factual allegation, resist voluntary departure or appeal an adverse ruling? Who sees the child’s confidential statements? Can a supervisor outside the representation team influence case strategy? Could information supplied by the child for legal advice migrate to ORR, ICE or another enforcement component? And what happens when a child’s best legal strategy conflicts with an administration’s broader immigration policy?
HHS anticipated at least part of that problem in the Federal Register notice. UACLRD is specifically separated from ORR and other HHS components, and the notice says the division may coordinate with other federal entities only as necessary and consistent with its professional responsibilities to the children it represents. That language is significant because it identifies the child, not HHS, as the client in those cases.
Advocates remain skeptical. Wendy Young of Kids in Need of Defense told AP that the structure puts the child’s lawyer, the immigration judge and the government attorney seeking removal on the federal payroll, and she raised the possibility that institutional pressure could shape advice toward departure rather than a full presentation of the child’s claims. That is an expressed concern, not a documented instruction from HHS. The distinction matters: the new office should be judged on what its lawyers are authorized, resourced and protected to do, not on a hypothetical outcome assumed in advance.
What HHS has promised
A dedicated division, direct attorney-client representation, separation from ORR and ACF, a ban on advising those entities in a child’s own matter, and coordination limited by lawyers’ professional responsibilities.
What the notice does not answer
Staffing levels, caseload limits, hiring qualifications, supervisory protections, case-transfer rules, data firewalls, how disagreements with agency leadership will be handled, and whether outside nonprofit representation will continue at scale.
A credible firewall has to survive the hard case: the moment when the child’s lawful litigation strategy is inconvenient to the agency that signs the lawyer’s paycheck.
A year and a half of litigation, payment fights and contract turnover
The in-house division cannot be understood apart from the collapse and attempted reconstruction of the outside legal-services system. In March 2025, the government moved to terminate funding that flowed through the Acacia Center for Justice to organizations representing unaccompanied children. A coalition of legal-service providers sued HHS. In April 2025, a federal judge in Northern California issued a preliminary injunction blocking the withdrawal of that funding.
The litigation did not end the operational conflict. By summer 2026, providers told the court that HHS had withheld payments for work performed under the contract. On August 6, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered the government to release funds it had withheld since December 2025 and said HHS could not condition compliance with the injunction on additional information from Acacia. The judge also noted that the Acacia contract had expired July 31 and ordered HHS to report how it would continue complying with the injunction after that expiration.
At roughly the same time, HHS was trying multiple replacement mechanisms. It announced an intended single-source award to a small Houston firm, Burke Law Group, for legal services in ORR care; that firm later withdrew from consideration. HHS also awarded a separate contract to Our Rescue, an anti-trafficking nonprofit, with a potential value of roughly $244 million. AP reported that the transition involved short-term arrangements, including a temporary contract with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, while children and providers faced uncertainty about who would appear in court and when files would transfer.
Procurement itself became part of the story. The Government Accountability Office on September 18 denied an Acacia protest challenging terms in HHS’s solicitation for unaccompanied-child legal services. GAO’s decision said the incumbent system involved approximately 24,000 active cases and described a performance work statement that included direct representation in immigration court and DHS proceedings. Eleven days later, HHS’s reorganization notice publicly established UACLRD inside the Office of the General Counsel.
Funding cut announced
ORR moved to stop the contract line items that supported direct legal representation through Acacia’s provider network.
Federal injunction
A Northern California judge ordered the government not to withdraw the funding while the case proceeded.
Incumbent contract expires
The expiration intensified the transition problem because thousands of active attorney-client relationships could not be reassigned instantaneously.
Judge orders withheld funds released
The court said HHS’s additional payment conditions were inconsistent with the preliminary injunction and demanded a compliance report.
GAO denies solicitation protest
GAO rejected Acacia’s challenge to several terms of HHS’s legal-services request for proposals.
HHS creates UACLRD
The department formally assigns direct child representation to a new Office of the General Counsel division with an internal independence clause.
Representation changes what a child can realistically do in court
Immigration law is difficult even for adults with fluent English, stable housing and time to gather records. Unaccompanied children may be navigating the system after trauma, while moving from federal custody to a sponsor, changing schools, crossing state lines, or communicating through an interpreter. Some may have potential asylum claims. Others may need a state juvenile-court finding as part of a Special Immigrant Juvenile case. Still others may have no viable path to stay and need accurate advice about departure. Sorting among those possibilities is legal work, not merely paperwork.
Recent research reinforces how strongly counsel is associated with case outcomes. A 2025 study by Chiara Galli and Tatiana Padilla, published in the International Migration Review and analyzing nearly half a million unaccompanied-minor immigration cases from 2009 through early 2023, found that only about half of children in the study obtained representation at any point. The researchers reported that children with positive outcomes had much higher representation rates than children ordered deported. The study is descriptive and does not mean a lawyer mechanically causes a favorable result; stronger claims may be more likely to attract counsel. But it shows how deeply legal representation and meaningful access to the process are intertwined.
The pressure is broader than children’s cases. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reported in September that representation in completed immigration-court cases had fallen sharply in fiscal 2026. In August, TRAC said only about one in four immigrants had a lawyer in cases where a removal order was issued. Those data cover the overall immigration-court population, not only unaccompanied children, but they capture the system-level shortage into which HHS is trying to insert a new federal legal team.
Legal advice is triage
A child may need to understand asylum, Special Immigrant Juvenile status, trafficking protections, voluntary departure, deadlines, venue changes, evidence and appeals. The job is to identify which path fits the facts and which does not.
Continuity is part of quality
An attorney who knows the child’s history, documents and deadlines cannot always be replaced by a new lawyer on short notice without risk. Case transfer is therefore more than an administrative handoff.
An in-house office could solve some problems — and create new ones
There is a plausible operational case for keeping at least some representation capacity inside HHS. A permanent federal office could be less vulnerable to the stop-start cycle of annual contracts, bid protests and bridge agreements. It could preserve institutional knowledge when a vendor changes. It could be positioned close to ORR systems while still operating behind a legal firewall. And if Congress and HHS adequately staff it, the office could provide a backstop in places where nonprofit providers cannot recruit enough immigration lawyers.
Those potential advantages are not guarantees. The federal hiring process is slow, specialized child-immigration expertise is scarce, and a national docket of tens of thousands of cases cannot be covered credibly by a small headquarters team. Immigration representation also is local in ways that organizational charts often miss: state juvenile-court practice matters for Special Immigrant Juvenile cases; interpreters and community organizations matter; attorneys must know local court procedures; and children released to sponsors may move far from the shelter where they first received legal orientation.
That is why the size of UACLRD may matter as much as its existence. HHS has not publicly said how many attorneys the unit will employ, what caseload targets will apply, where lawyers will be stationed, or how the office will decide which children receive direct representation. A formal right to a confidential consultation means little if the lawyer has too little time to prepare. An independence clause means little if supervisors can override strategy. A national office means little if it cannot appear where the child’s case is actually pending.
Who controls the case?
The child and counsel should make litigation decisions under applicable professional rules, not ORR case managers or immigration-enforcement officials.
Who can see the file?
HHS should explain the technical and policy barriers that prevent privileged or confidential legal material from flowing to components outside the representation team.
What is the caseload?
Attorney headcount, geographic coverage and active-case load will reveal whether the office is substantive counsel or a thin layer over a much larger unmet need.
Can outside counsel remain?
The strongest model may be plural: independent nonprofit providers, pro bono lawyers and an in-house backstop, rather than a single channel controlled by one institution.
Outside providers are still part of the picture, but the picture is unstable
Nothing in the September 29 reorganization notice says UACLRD is the exclusive source of counsel. That is an important point. HHS can build an internal representation division while also continuing to contract with independent legal-service providers. Indeed, the existing regulation still describes grants and contracts for legal services, and the government has continued procurement activity for outside representation.
The difficulty is that the transition has already produced gaps. AP reported that children have recently appeared at hearings without lawyers and that nonprofit providers have struggled to secure new counsel after the Acacia funding arrangement ended. A temporary contractor began taking cases while older lawyers still had ethical duties to existing clients. That creates a handoff problem familiar to any legal system: a government may change vendors on a date certain, but an attorney-client relationship does not transfer cleanly just because a procurement calendar says it should.
The Our Rescue award adds another layer. Congressional Democrats questioned whether the anti-trafficking nonprofit had enough immigration-law experience and demanded information about staffing, subcontractors and information-sharing. The organization has said its mission and experience protecting vulnerable children make it suited to the work. The core factual issue is not the organization’s branding; it is whether the contractor can field enough qualified attorneys, preserve confidentiality, manage thousands of cases and provide continuity across jurisdictions.
GAO’s September decision also shows that HHS is trying to specify a more structured national service model through a competitive solicitation. The agency prevailed on the protest issues before GAO, including challenges to invoicing requirements and the scope of representation. But a procurement win does not answer the policy question raised by UACLRD: how much of the child’s representation should be delivered by independent outside counsel, and how much should sit inside the same department responsible for the child’s federal care?
Institutional debates eventually become a conversation across a small table
For a child, the system is not experienced as a contest between acronyms. It is a sequence of adults asking questions: Border Patrol, ORR staff, sponsor-screening personnel, lawyers, judges, interpreters and sometimes state-court officials. Trust is therefore an operational asset. A child who does not understand whether a lawyer is truly confidential may withhold details about abuse, trafficking, gang threats, family relationships or fears of return — facts that can be legally significant.
That is one reason the regulatory requirement for a confidential consultation matters. The lawyer must be able to explain, in terms a child understands, who the client is, what information is private, what decisions the child can make, what the lawyer is required to do, and what the lawyer is not permitted to share. HHS can strengthen the credibility of its new office by making those safeguards visible: written independence rules, auditable access controls, clear conflict procedures and a process for transferring a child to outside counsel when institutional conflicts arise.
Transparency should also extend to outcomes. HHS could publish aggregate data on how many children UACLRD represents, how quickly counsel is assigned, average attorney caseloads, how often cases are transferred to outside lawyers, how often interpreters are used, and whether representation continues after children leave ORR custody. None of those metrics would require exposing a child’s confidential case details. They would allow Congress, courts, providers and the public to evaluate whether the office is actually expanding access to counsel.
The new office should be neither presumed compromised nor presumed sufficient
It is tempting to treat the debate as binary. One side sees a government lawyer and assumes the representation cannot be independent. The other sees a formal firewall and assumes the conflict has been solved. Neither conclusion is justified yet.
The strongest argument for UACLRD is institutional durability. A child should not lose a lawyer because a contract expired, a bid protest delayed an award or an agency refused an invoice. Building direct capacity inside HHS could reduce that fragility. The strongest argument against relying on UACLRD alone is the value of outside independence: nonprofit lawyers have separate management, separate data systems, distinct professional cultures and fewer institutional incentives to accommodate the policies of the department that houses ORR.
A hybrid system may prove more resilient than either extreme. HHS could maintain an internal corps for emergency coverage and hard-to-staff jurisdictions while preserving a large, independent provider network for ongoing representation. Clear conflict rules could require automatic transfer to outside counsel when a child’s position directly challenges HHS conduct. Transparent performance data could show whether the internal lawyers are taking contested cases, filing appeals and pursuing relief with the same freedom expected of any attorney representing a private client.
The immediate risk is not theoretical. The transition has already left uncertainty around thousands of active cases. The legal system cannot pause children’s deadlines while agencies redesign procurement. Whatever model HHS ultimately uses, the measure of success is concrete: every child should know who the lawyer is, the lawyer should know who the client is, and neither should have to guess whether confidential advocacy will be treated as a problem inside the government.
Key questions, answered
Do unaccompanied children automatically get a government-appointed lawyer?
No. Immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal, and the Justice Department says immigration judges cannot appoint counsel for unaccompanied juveniles. Federal law and HHS regulations nevertheless impose special duties to facilitate access to counsel, and Congress has funded legal-service programs for children.
Is HHS’s new legal division the same as ICE?
No. HHS and the Department of Homeland Security are separate cabinet departments. ORR is inside HHS and is responsible for the care and placement of unaccompanied children; ICE is inside DHS and its lawyers represent DHS in removal proceedings. The new child-representation division is inside HHS’s Office of the General Counsel.
Why do advocates still see a conflict risk?
Because the child’s lawyer would be a federal employee inside the same department that houses ORR, while other federal components are litigating the child’s immigration status. HHS says UACLRD is independent from ORR in represented matters. The dispute is over whether that firewall will be strong enough in practice.
Could HHS keep using nonprofit lawyers too?
Yes. The reorganization notice does not make UACLRD exclusive, and federal regulations continue to contemplate grants and contracts for legal services. HHS has also been pursuing outside contracts during the transition.
What would prove the new office is genuinely independent?
Public rules protecting client confidentiality, documented authority for lawyers to choose strategy without agency interference, manageable caseloads, conflict-transfer procedures, continued access to outside counsel and aggregate reporting that shows the office is taking and litigating real cases.
The standard should be simple: the lawyer’s loyalty must be legible to the child
HHS deserves to be judged on implementation, not assumption. The department has put meaningful independence language into the new division’s charter, and an internal legal corps could help stabilize a system battered by contract turnover. But independence is not self-executing. The government should publish the safeguards that make the promise real: who supervises the attorneys, who can access files, how conflicts trigger outside referrals, how caseloads are capped and how representation continues after release from ORR custody.
For the child sitting across the table, institutional complexity should disappear. The answer to “Whose lawyer are you?” must be unmistakable: yours.
Sources & primary documents
- U.S. Government Publishing Office, HHS Statement of Organization, Functions, and Delegations of Authority, Sept. 29, 2026: Federal Register notice creating UACLRD.
- 45 C.F.R. § 410.1309: current legal-services requirements for unaccompanied children.
- U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review: juvenile practice guidance and legal representation information.
- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Office of the Principal Legal Advisor role in removal proceedings.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Acacia Center for Justice, B-424162.4, Sept. 18, 2026: procurement protest decision.
- U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, Aug. 6, 2026: order enforcing the preliminary injunction.
- Associated Press, Oct. 6-7, 2026: reporting on HHS’s new government-lawyer model and provider transition.
- Chiara Galli and Tatiana Padilla, International Migration Review: New Data on Unaccompanied Minors in US Immigration Court (2009-2023).
- Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Sept. 15, 2026: Too Few Immigration Attorneys; Where You Live Impacts Representation.
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