After cutting ties to a legal network that helped thousands of children in government custody for nearly two decades, Donald Trump’s administration is awarding $150 million to a small law firm in Texas to represent roughly 20,000 migrant children who entered the U.S. without a parent or guardian.

The Department of Health and Human Services is hiring Burke Law Group, a firm founded by a former Trump administration official who does not appear to have extensive experience in immigration law or work with unaccompanied minors.

Burke Law Group will “provide legal orientation, legal consultation and attorney-of-record representation services” to children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to the agreement.

The firm’s founder and managing partner Marcella Burke previously worked as deputy solicitor and senior counsel at the Department of the Interior and as deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency during the first Trump administration.

A 2024 profile describes her firm as “for lawyers whose positions have been terminated” from firms that Burke describes as “having adopted the ideologies of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and “Environmental, Social and Governance” standards. “We are lawyers who want to be lawyers,” she told Man & Culture Magazine at the time.

Only one attorney from the 26 listed on the Houston-based firm’s website mentions experience representing unaccompanied minors in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement

The Independent has requested comment from the firm.

The federal government is required to facilitate legal counsel for unaccompanied children in government custody, though roughly 20,000 children are currently without legal representation after the Trump administration ended a contract with the Unaccompanied Children Program, a network of more than 100 organizations administered by the Acacia Center for Justice.

Those children effectively lost their representation overnight when the contract ended July 31.

The contract with Burke’s firm, which was first reported by NOTUS, is not expected to begin until August 15.

Acacia said it declined another contract with the Trump administration because of a new stipulation that required legal service providers to turn over confidential client information that the organization said could be used to deport them.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement stopped paying the groups for legal services in November in an effort to “extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to," according to Acacia.

“That would not only violate our legal ethics, but also our moral values,” Acacia said in a statement last week.

“While Acacia may no longer be that provider, we are adamant that whichever organization takes over this contract, it must have the deep experience required to navigate our country’s complex immigration system and the training to work with vulnerable children, many of whom fled violence, trafficking, and abuse to come to this country,” according to Acacia.

“The administration doesn’t get to manufacture a crisis, offer an unacceptable ‘fix,’ and then claim it’s solved,” Acacia said. “More than 20,000 unaccompanied children are waiting for a real solution — one that comes with experienced immigration attorneys who will do what the law calls for and stand up for their rights.”

Acacia’s executive director Shaina Aber said children without legal representation “won’t know the legal rights they may be entitled to without a lawyer by their side.”

“What they will know is that there is an administration in power that is doing everything it can to expedite their deportation,” she said last week.

A group of legal nonprofits sued the government last year for $65 million, money owed for legal services that they say the administration has failed to pay them.

Children in government custody “desperately need an advocate in their corner to keep them safe and to ensure their due process rights and best interests are respected,” according to Moira Duvernay, deputy director at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, which was among advocacy groups in Acacia’s network.

“Forcing these children to navigate our immigration system alone would be unfathomably cruel,” she said.

The Unaccompanied Alien Children Bureau inside the Office of Refugee Resettlement has come under intense scrutiny over the last year as the Trump administration accelerates a mass deportation campaign that is increasingly targeting immigrant families with children far beyond the U.S. Mexico border.

Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement dismissed widespread reports among immigration lawyers and advocates that it was launching a wider effort to deport migrant children. But offers to self-deport followed an ongoing legal battles over aborted efforts to remove dozens of Honduran and Guatemalan children from the country, as lawyers and shelter workers scrambled to prevent what they have feared are imminent attempts to deport them.

Attorneys for unaccompanied migrant children successfully blocked a middle-of-the-night operation to deport Guatemalan minors in government custody after a series of harrowing affidavits described their fears of abruptly returning to their home country.

Lawyers for the children, who are now in government-supported foster programs and long-term shelters after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone, subsequently accused the Trump administration of trying to get them to self-deport through “misinformation, coercion, threats and fear.”

The Trump administration is also concentrating all pregnant children in immigration enforcement custody into one group shelter in south Texas, where abortion is outlawed with no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest.