An estimated 26,000 children who entered the U.S. without parents or guardians are expected to be left without independent legal representation as soon as Monday, according to lawyers who help represent them.
For more than two decades, the U.S. has been required by law to protect children who cross the border alone, because of fears that they could be easily exploited, abused or trafficked. After children cross the border unaccompanied, they are typically transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). A network of nearly 100 legal groups helps provide children who arrive in ORR custody with legal services, funded by Congress.
But in November, ORR stopped paying for those legal services, after lawyers declined to provide the agency with confidential information it had requested about the children. The attorneys say that information is covered by attorney-client privilege.
"The government is withholding payment for work that has already been performed in order to extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to," Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that manages the legal services contract with ORR, said in a statement on Thursday.
ORR did not renew the contract with the network of legal providers, which expired Friday.
Human Rights Glance
The genocide in Gaza since October 2023, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, has marked a historic turning point in the Palestinian struggle and in the nature of the conflict with the Zionist project.
For most students, the General Secondary Education Certificate, known as Tawjihi in Palestine, marks the end of school and the start of a new chapter.
Salma* was taken aback when her manager sent a message to the staff WhatsApp group instructing employees to acknowledge a ban on speaking Arabic in their shop.
Israeli rights groups have called on the international community to intervene in order to prevent a "pogrom" in the occupied West Bank.






























