A law firm whose closest thing to immigration expertise is a corporate lawyer who changed fields five months ago has been handed $150 million to represent the most vulnerable children in the federal deportation machine.

"We cannot have a random law firm entrusted to take care of children."

— Michael Lukens, director of the Amica Center

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 is one of the few statutes that still stands between the government and the deportation of unaccompanied migrant children. It requires the federal government to facilitate legal representation for any child placed in removal proceedings. The law was born from a bipartisan recognition that children who flee violence, trafficking, and gang recruitment deserve more than a bus ticket back to danger.

On August 5, the Trump administration honored that letter of the law in precisely the way a malicious compliance manual would recommend. It announced a sole-source contract awarding $150 million to the Burke Law Group, a Houston-based firm whose founder served in the Trump administration, whose partners include a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and whose entire roster of 25 lawyers includes exactly two people listed as having any immigration experience.

The contract starts August 15. The previous contract, with a network of nearly 100 legal aid providers spanning the country, was allowed to expire last Friday.

Translation: the government is required to give migrant children lawyers, so it hired people who are not lawyers for this specific purpose.

Marcella Burke founded her firm after serving in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior during Trump's first term. She has never been listed as handling immigration cases. Her colleague Justin Shubow, described by the Associated Press as "the leading supporter of Trump's efforts to require federal buildings to adhere to classical and traditional architectural styles," brings his expertise in federal architecture to bear on the legal defense of children facing deportation. Ilya Shapiro, listed as "senior counsel," is a conservative legal scholar who was placed on leave by Georgetown Law after tweeting about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that she was a "lesser black woman" because she did not fit into his preferred "intersectionality hierarchy."

Two lawyers at the firm have immigration experience on paper. According to Bloomberg Law, those two attorneys joined Burke Law in July of this year. The firm updated its website to reflect their new expertise on August 3, two days before the contract announcement. One of these two attorneys also appears to be simultaneously running a different law firm. The other, Andrea Laprade, previously practiced securitization law at a white-shoe firm and reinvented herself as an immigration lawyer five months ago. She is not admitted to practice in Texas or other border states where most unaccompanied minor cases are heard.

This is not incompetence. This is a design feature.

The previous legal aid network did something Burke Law Group cannot do. It provided know-your-rights trainings inside government shelters. It directly represented children in immigration court proceedings across dozens of jurisdictions. It had relationships with juvenile advocates, social workers, and translators. It understood the difference between an asylum claim based on gang threats and a claim based on trafficking. Its attorneys appeared before the same immigration judges repeatedly and knew how the courts actually functioned.

Instead, the administration gave the sole-source contract to a firm whose website still reads like a corporate defense roster. The contract bypassed competitive bidding entirely, and the government offered no justification for doing so. Under federal procurement rules, sole-source awards are supposed to be reserved for situations where only one provider can possibly perform the work.

The reality is closer to the opposite: only one provider was being considered, because the government had already decided which firm would get the money before the old contract expired.

The chaos did not stop at the contract announcement. According to AP reporting, attorneys across the country have witnessed attorneys they do not recognize appearing in immigration court hearings, claiming they had been contacted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to represent children whose existing lawyers were already present. In Chicago, an attorney from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants appeared via video stream at a hearing she was not part of, claiming she had received the children's names and identifying numbers from the federal government. The judge cut her off.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement also sent emails to existing children's lawyers demanding their clients' personal identification numbers, with a four-hour response deadline, asking them to confirm they would be appearing at upcoming hearings. It was unclear why the government needed this information, or why it was being demanded on such short notice from attorneys who were already representing these children.

One reading: the administration is creating confusion inside immigration courtrooms on purpose. When children's lawyers do not know who is authorized to represent their clients, cases move faster. When cases move faster, more children are deported.

The broader context makes the contract decision even more revealing. Since April, immigration courts have begun calling dozens of cases simultaneously in "rocket dockets," compressing hearings and giving children and their attorneys dramatically less time to prepare. Legal aid providers report struggling to receive reimbursement for work performed since last November, with the administration demanding detailed information about clients that the lawyers say they are ethically unable to provide.

The previous network of legal aid organizations had also been targeted with raids. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Health and Human Services agents showed up at their offices in an apparent effort to intimidate them. But intimidation only works when there are people left to intimidate. By letting the old contract expire and replacing it with a shell firm staffed by political appointees and corporate lawyers, the administration effectively removed the one institutional barrier between its deportation apparatus and children who have no other advocate.

Of the roughly 23,800 unaccompanied minors currently in the U.S. system, about 1,800 live in government shelters. The Burke contract covers only those 1,800 children. There is no information about who will represent the remaining 22,000 children living with sponsors and family members. The administration has not said whether another contract will be issued, whether existing providers can continue informally, or whether those 22,000 children simply exist outside the scope of any legal requirement.

The law requires representation. The government provided it, technically, to the same degree that a person who gives someone else's child to a man named Ilya Shapiro has "facilitated the welfare of a minor."

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act was designed to ensure that children who flee violence do not find themselves standing alone before a judge with a deportation order. What the Burke Law Group contract accomplishes is turning that guarantee into a joke with a price tag. The children are still in shelters. They still have cases. They still fear being sent back to countries where their lives are not safe. They just have $150 million worth of lawyers who do not know what they are doing, hired by a government that does not want them to succeed.

The question is not whether this violates the spirit of the law. The question is whether any court will notice before enough children are deported to make it irrelevant.