In the week before our November 9 conversation, a court observer in San Diego recorded video of an 8-year-old Haitian boy being zip-tied and ushered into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement after ICE deported his father. In Miami that same week, a boy sitting in the courtroom waiting for his hearing was almost ordered removed for not being there, because his attorney, the judge and the DHS attorney were all appearing by video and nobody knew the boy was in the room. Stories like this are happening every day, according to Katie Fleming of Acacia.
November 9 marked 100 days since children in the deportation process lost competent legal advocates when the federal contract that paid for them expired on July 31, with no clear plan in sight for how to fill the gap in services.
Acacia’s analysis of immigration court data, published October 15 as a preliminary set of descriptive statistics, found that removal orders went from an average of 28 percent of unaccompanied children’s cases from 2021 through 2024 to 48 percent in 2025 and 69 percent of the cases completed in the first eight months of 2026.
Children who never had a lawyer received a removal order in 88 percent of their cases this year, up from more than two-thirds in 2024, and even children who had a lawyer at some point saw their removal rate climb from below 10 percent in 2024 to 39 percent. Katie said the network of about 100 nonprofits was serving nearly 20,000 children when the contract ended.
Many of you have seen the headlines. You can imagine the absurdity of toddlers going in front of a judge alone. But understanding the reality of what is actually happening in court now — that’s a deeper story. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Dr. Marsha Griffin, Katie Fleming and Neha Desai.
You can watch or listen to the whole conversation above, but I want to share what I took away from it and introduce you to the unique, complementary perspectives from these three persistent advocates.
As a pediatrician, Dr. Griffin explains what it means for a child to face a hearing alone and helps us envision an age-appropriate system for evaluating children’s asylum cases outside of an adversarial setting. For those of us who have worked in the immigration system so long that we have a hard time thinking truly outside the box, Dr. Griffin and her network of pediatric court observers remind us that this system is an absurd deviation from everything we know about child welfare. Her commitment to the children is unwavering:
“Every child needs a child advocate… And every child needs legal representation… Every kid is a kid worth saving.”
Dr. Marsha Griffin, Community for Children
Katie Fleming shares what observers are documenting in children’s hearings — currently the only real visibility we have on how children are being treated. Katie is an immigration attorney with almost 15 years of experience, and at Acacia she oversees public education and engagement and co-leads Witness for Justice, the organization’s national court observation project. Her team turns what observers see in immigration courtrooms into data, stories, trainings and advocacy reports, with the aim of promoting transparency, accountability and due process. Katie emphasized that the system is too broken, that we can’t afford to go backward, and that we have to go forward.
“They all answer to the same boss, and there are huge problems with that structure… the prosecutor, DHS, a trained attorney, going up against an unrepresented child and saying, for this hearing today only, I will give you up to $3,000 if you leave the country and waive your rights to an appeal, waive your rights to any relief. That is not a justice system that should happen in this country or any country… There’s no going back to normal. We need to rethink the entire system.”
Katie Fleming, Acacia Center for Justice
Neha Desai, a children’s rights attorney who has served as counsel on federal class actions for children in immigration custody, describes the legal fights now underway, including a new case over expedited hearings and judges who refuse any continuances. She reminds us that this did not happen by accident, since the administration, and in particular the White House Chief of Staff, has been obsessed with unaccompanied children for years, and Project 2025 laid out the vision for taking apart, brick by brick, the protections Congress built.
“It has been 20 years of building up protections and 2 years of decimating them. Decimating them almost entirely… No matter how hard they fight right now, the walls are closing in. Every obstacle imaginable and unimaginable has been put in front of them, and there is no way for them to prevail… And this is by design.”
Neha Desai, National Center for Youth Law
What’s happening to kids in immigration court right now is the starkest example of a problem that runs through the whole system, which is what happens to a court when the people stop believing the process is fair. That problem is older than this administration and bigger than any one docket, but the treatment of children right now could be the nail in the coffin.
In a dissent, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote that “The Court’s authority — possessed of neither the purse nor the sword — ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction.”¹ His point is that courts only have legitimacy because we believe they have legitimacy; abuse our trust too far, and the courts lose that legitimacy.
The immigration courts have long coasted on borrowed confidence inspired by the architecture and robes of Justice while masking routine injustices — despite efforts from many people, judges included, to conform to the gravity of their responsibility. Today, the courts are in a full-blown legitimacy crisis exemplified by this administration’s active dismantling of “public confidence in its moral sanction.” Nowhere is this clearer than the treatment of kids without families (i.e., unaccompanied children) who are forced to sit in front of a hand-picked “deportation judge,” across from an ICE attorney whose job is to have them deported, alone, with no one left to advocate for their best interest.
What Katie, Neha and Dr. Griffin described is public confidence being taken apart piece by piece, from judges who cancel asylum applications on paper before a child even gets a hearing to the administration’s plan, reported by the Associated Press on October 6, to have lawyers employed by the Department of Health and Human Services represent these children, which would leave their defense to the same government that is trying to remove them. Neha called this plan “patently absurd,” and said that Homeland Security has now taken over the Office of Refugee Resettlement. She said the plan has not yet taken effect, so there is still a window to stop it.
That window may be short, since Katie said she is hearing rumblings about a deadline at the end of the year to get through unaccompanied children’s cases. One participant asked whether the Executive Office for Immigration Review intends to clear the juvenile docket by January, which in practice would mean rushing the cases a judge can dispose of quickly and steering children toward voluntary departure or a deportation order. The date has not been confirmed, but if it holds, the deadline falls before the Democrats take their seats in January and long before a new administration could take office in two years (assuming that happens).
Dr. Griffin said it directly: “It cannot wait for January.” The petition, the donation and the court observer sign-up below are the places to start this week.