By PAUL KIEFERCapital News ServiceThe Trump administration is moving ahead with plans to end a contract that pays for the legal representation of children navigating immigration court cases after entering the country without parents or guardians. That decision could have outsized impacts in Marylan d, where a disproportionate share of unaccompanied immigrant children have landed in recent years, often fleeing violence, sexual abuse, and neglect.The state’s nonprofit legal aid groups are now grappling with the prospect of young clients facing the courts alone, raising the risk that children miss hearings, lose connections to service providers, and receive deportation orders.  Estefani Flores Portillo, a social services coordinator with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, says the loss of funding could also leave more than a thousand clients across Maryland — most in their teens — to balance fending for themselves in immigration court with the day-to-day challenges of acclimating to a new country.“Outside of their legal case, they also have other priorities,” she said. Most of her clients are enrolled in school, some hold down jobs to cover basic living expenses, and many require therapy to process traumas inflicted both in their home countries and during their journeys to the U.S. Burdened with those competing pressures, she added, “it would be hard for them to focus on the legal case” without the assistance of an attorney.On March 21, the administration notified nonprofit legal aid groups providing representation for unaccompanied immigrant children that it would terminate the contract that funds their work. Those legal aid groups collectively represent more than 26,000 children with cases before immigration courts across the country, and they provide consultations and referrals to thousands more each year.The withdrawal of federal support for legal representation of immigrant children comes as immigration courts struggle to manage a staggering backlog of cases, including more than 50,000 in Maryland alone as of February 2025. Maryland has received among the largest numbers of unaccompanied immigrant children in the past decade relative to other states.  Data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) indicates that nearly 40,000 unaccompanied immigrant children have been released to sponsors – either family members or volunteers – in Maryland since 2014. A majority of those children arrived after 2020, primarily from Central America.Only Texas, California, Florida and New York received more unaccompanied immigrant children in the same period.Roughly 13,000 of those children landed in Prince George’s County alone, though even some corners of rural Maryland have seen hundreds of new arrivals in the past five years. Even with legal representation, unaccompanied children often spend years awaiting the resolution of their case, both because of the burden on immigration courts and asylum offices and because of the limited number of visas available each year.“Kids don’t want to think about these things longer than they have to,” said Caroline Hodge, a supervising attorney with the Amica Center. The immigration court system is difficult enough for attorneys to navigate, she added, and children hardly stand a chance on their own.Though the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires HHS to provide legal counsel to all children in its care “to the greatest extent possible,” thousands of children with open immigration cases already lack representation. That shortfall is driven in part by a nationwide shortage of immigration attorneys prepared to work with juvenile clients. Until this month, federal dollars also helped nonprofits like the Amica Center train attorneys willing to volunteer their time to represent children in immigration court. The end of the federal contract supporting her organization’s work, Hodge said, also means her team will no longer be able to provide that training.   Immigration court data collected by the U.S. Department of Justice between 2004 and 2016 suggests that roughly 60 percent of children with cases in a Maryland immigration court had legal representation during that period. The same data indicates that while nearly all children with attorneys appeared in court for a final decision in their case, only a third of those without attorneys did so. “The idea of going to court is so terrifying for a child,” Hodge said, “and people without information, without representation, will definitely feel more fearful to engage.”The Trump administration has already signaled its interest in following through on deportation orders issued for children who fail to appear for immigration court hearings.Maryland’s Department of Human Services, which houses the state’s Office for Refugees and Asylees, has so far avoided commenting on the end of federal funding for immigrant children’s legal representation. A department spokesperson referred CNS to its federal counterpart, HHS, for comment, though that agency likewise did not immediately respond to inquiries about the expected outcomes of the decision. Meanwhile, legal aid groups told Capital News Service that some attorneys fear that continuing to offer pro bono legal assistance to immigrants will make them targets, citing the White House’s recent efforts to punish law firms deemed hostile to the administration. ...read more read less