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.



Russian missiles tore into the Ukrainian capital before dawn on Saturday, killing nine people and injuring more than 30 others as part of an intensive, ongoing Russian air campaign.
A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to slam into the moon on Wednesday, according to scientists.
It’s five years this month since the chaotic retreat of US forces from Kabul. The Nato-backed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC, is now widely regarded as a failure.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, on Sunday told American parents that they should get their children vaccinated against measles, as the surge in infections has reached numbers not seen in the past 35 years.
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.
The Columbia University student workers' union withdrew its demand that the university divest financially from Israel at a bargaining meeting this week.
A heatwave scorching the western US region has elevated the risk of hazardous fire conditions particularly in parts of Oregon and Washington, where low humidity and powerful winds have put officials on alert for wildfire spread.





























