NY to pay for lawyers for children at risk of deportation

New York will pay $7.25 million for immigration lawyers to help defend the state’s 1,400 unaccompanied minors who are facing deportation proceedings alone, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Wednesday, saying she’s filling a gap left by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The immigrants — all under 18, some just a few years old — are being forced to navigate the immigration bureaucracy by themselves, a prospect that even an adult would find intimidating and insurmountable, she said.

"Imagine being that little kid so scared in an unfamiliar country, missing Mom and Dad, not knowing much English, trying to defend yourself in a courtroom. Any parent knows that is preposterous," Hochul said, speaking at a news conference at her Manhattan office and flanked by Mayor Zohran Mamdani; the state’s attorney general, Letitia James; immigration advocates; and state legislators.

Hochul said the money, being awarded by the New York State Office for New Americans to a group of legal services providers led by the Hispanic Federation, is necessary because the federal government under Trump was failing in its duty to hire competent lawyers for the minors. She said the federal government awarded no-bid contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including to a Trump-connected firm in Texas with little experience in immigration law and to another firm in Utah founded by an accused sexual abuser and trafficker.

A call to the White House's press office rang unanswered. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Earlier this year, the city allocated over $16 million to help fund legal services for unaccompanied minors.

At issue are federal contracts the Trump administration hasn't renewed with long-established organizations that for almost two decades had provided unaccompanied minors with legal representation.

A federal law signed in 2008 by President George W. Bush requires the federal government to provide "unaccompanied alien children ... counsel to represent them in legal proceedings ... to the greatest extent practicable." Adults generally have no right to free counsel in immigration proceedings.

Nationwide, there are now over 20,000 unaccompanied minors — immigrants who are living in the country illegally, are under 18 and have no parent or guardian in the United States — who are facing deportation, according to the Acadia Center for Justice, one of the legal services providers whose contracts ended earlier this year.

In New York, there are 1,400 unaccompanied minors, about 750 of whom are in the city, according to Faiza Ali, the city’s commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.

Of the 1,400, more than 250 are detained, according to a news release from Hochul’s office. Some of those are detained on Long Island, according to Murad Awawdeh, head of the New York Immigration Coalition, who was at the event.

 Mamdani said the lack of representation had left many unaccompanied minors without protections while in detention centers.

"For those currently being held in detention centers without access to their lawyers, this means that there is no longer anyone tasked with ensuring they are healthy, they are safe and that they are protected," Mamdani said. 

The announcement at Hochul's office was the latest by state and local officials to oppose Trump’s immigration policies.

Since he took office, the state has banned local law enforcement from cooperating with federal agents to enforce immigration law, a policy under which Nassau County’s agreements with the Trump administration must be ended once the law goes into effect later this month. Another state law allows those harmed by federal immigration agents to sue in state court

Appearing on Wednesday with Hochul, Mamdani and the other officials was Linda Wolff, who is planning to sue under that law. In a viral video, she was pepper-sprayed in the face last week by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer while Wolff was protesting and recording an agency operation in the Inwood section of Manhattan.

"It felt like I didn’t have any rights and I didn’t have my First Amendment and I didn’t have the Constitution behind me, and now I do," Wolff said, adding: "No one should have to face physical harm like I did just for speaking out how I felt about them."