Children Are Facing Deportation Hearings Alone, Without Lawyers

On a September morning in an immigration courtroom in Manhattan, six children appeared on video screens.

Each had arrived at the southern border without a parent. Each faced a proceeding that could end in deportation. No lawyer stood with them to answer the judge.

That scene has become common in courtrooms in New York and Arizona. Jazmine Ulloa, a Times reporter who covers immigration and has been watching the hearings, described children trying to answer formal questions from judges without an adult to speak for them. A nonprofit group that tracks the courts found that most children who arrived without a parent and had cases heard through August went before a judge with no attorney.

In one hearing, a 13-year-old girl told the court she hoped to stay. She did not know where her parents were and had been staying with her brother in Honduras. After she said she did not fear being sent home, the judge ordered her deported.

In another hearing, a baby just past a first birthday was instructed to complete a request for asylum, a legal plea for protection from persecution, though the child had no counsel. Two teenagers, ages 15 and 17, accepted what the court calls voluntary departure, permission to leave on their own rather than be deported. In their cases, the requirement described in court was that they depart within a year.

Federal law says the government must try to provide migrant children with legal help to the greatest extent practicable. Ulloa reports that representation has long been scarce, and that the shortage has grown as immigration enforcement has increased.

This summer, the administration let expire a longstanding contract with a group that had supplied free lawyers to children. Officials said the group declined to share case information the government requested. The group said the material was protected by attorney-client privilege, the confidentiality rule that generally bars lawyers from disclosing what clients tell them.

A former Obama-era immigration official told The Times the move fit a broader rollback of protections for children. The former official said, "Every child deserves to be heard." When asked by The Times, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees how children without parents navigate immigration proceedings, rejected assertions that those children lack access to legal support.