Travelers, including a woman and a child, cross an international bridge in El Paso in May 2023, just before the expiration of Title 42. A New Mexico center representing unaccompanied immigrant children briefly lost most of its funding last week following a stop-work order from a federal agency. The order was quickly rescinded. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM)
A team at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center representing children in immigration court is breathing an uneasy sigh of relief after the majority of the team’s funding was abruptly cut, and then just as abruptly, restored last week.
The immigrant law center currently has about 250 children as clients, including some as young as 2 or 3. Without the center’s help, the vast majority of the kids would have to represent themselves in immigration court, said Andres Santiago, leader of the center’s children’s team, in an interview Friday with Source New Mexico.
The center is a subcontractor for Acacia Legal Services, which receives funding from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement to represent roughly 26,000 children under 18 who crossed the border without their parents. On Tuesday, the United States Department of the Interior issued the center a stop-work order and required it to inform its subcontractors across the country about the order.
The children’s team in New Mexico receives up to three-quarters of its funding from the federal government, Santiago said. The Tuesday announcement sent the team of seven attorneys into a flurry of activity. They called families of their clients and tried to reschedule court hearings to prevent a child going before a judge alone, he said. Families and kids called the center seeking urgent help, but the center was forced to put their cases on hold.
Santiago said he never got a clear explanation why the funding was cut. The same held true Friday morning when the stop-work order was rescinded.
“Just as quickly as the announcement came, came the announcement that it was being rescinded,” he told Source New Mexico. “And I think this kind of highlights the precarious nature of the funds. We’re kind of at the whim right now to what may happen in the future.”
The children the center represents have extended family in New Mexico. The children all crossed the border without their parents, including at ports of entry and elsewhere, largely coming from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, with a smaller number from Cuba and Venezuela, Santiago said.
A large number of them have suffered some form of abuse or neglect, Santiago said, including human or sex trafficking.
After federal immigration authorities encounter a child, they are held in custody for up to 72 hours and then sent to juvenile detention centers across the country for up to 30 days while authorities find and vet members of their extended families in the United States, Santiago said. The kids whose families live in New Mexico are paired with NMILC attorneys as their immigration cases proceed.
Many of the children qualify for humanitarian visas or are seeking asylum. Their lawyers help with that and also can argue to a judge that the kids should not be deemed high priority for deportation because they have a pathway to residency, Santiago said. It’s hard to imagine what would happen to those kids if there weren’t lawyers on their behalf in the courtroom, he said.
“Literally toddlers like 2 and 3 years old are some of the youngest ones that we’re working with,” he said. “And a stop-work order for them — like to expect a toddler or even a young person to represent themselves in court — it’s unjust, and it’s really cruel.”
Santiago said he remains mystified that President Donald Trump’s administration would seek to cut funding for immigrant children’s legal help. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the White House have repeatedly reauthorized funding, including for the current fiscal year.
“I can’t really speak to things on, like, a national level. What I can speak to is that we currently represent about 250 kids,” he said. “I can speak to the work that we’re doing has a real impact on the kids that we serve.”