Last year, on Labor Day weekend, an immigration attorney named Cooper Richardson spent her Saturday calling the Phoenix-area shelter where one of her clients—a child from Guatemala—was being held. She was checking to see if Immigration and Customs Enforcement was on the way: Her colleagues at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project had received word that the Trump administration was finalizing plans to summarily deport the roughly 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children detained across the country.

Richardson made one last call before she went to bed—and that’s when she learned the shelter had been told to have her client ready to leave within two hours. She rushed to her car, then spent the half-hour drive calling colleagues to see if they had advice for how she could ensure her client wasn’t taken. “I was nervous and shaking and scared,” she says, “and I’m not the one who might have been put on a plane.”

Ana Islas, who heads the Florence Project’s Tucson office, was on the other end of one of those calls. She had pulled together a rapid response team of lawyers and social workers available over the holiday weekend—a blood-pressure-spiking task in the best of times, made even more so by the Trump administration’s effort to cut off more than $200 million in federal funding for the legal defense of migrant children. Like many of its peers around the country, the Florence Project had been forced into layoffs earlier in the year, which meant the remaining attorneys were working longer hours to ensure clients got the representation they needed. “I talked to about 30 kids that Friday,” Islas says. “Including one as young as 3 years old.”

After Richardson arrived at the shelter outside Phoenix, she talked quietly with her client while the other detained children remained in their beds, trying to sleep. When a van from a company contracted to transport migrants arrived, Richardson met the drivers at the door. As soon as she explained who she was, they got on the phone. “I don’t think they were expecting to have any resistance,” she says. The contractors left; early Sunday morning, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security, which was forced to bring the children who had already been put on planes back to their shelters.

That frantic weekend is indicative of the immense pressure that Donald Trump’s campaign to deport roughly 14 million undocumented Americans has put on legal aid groups, whose work often goes beyond representation in immigration court to include giving know-your-rights presentations at shelters and employing social workers to connect migrants with housing and food assistance.

Within his first few months in office, Trump ended “humanitarian parole” for the 1.4 million refugees and migrants who entered the country during the Biden administration and appointed an acting director of ICE who pledged to make deportations as efficient as Amazon Prime, “but for human beings.”Since then, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove migrants accused of a violent or drug-related crime without a trial, terminated Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitian migrants, canceled the resettlement of all refugees who aren’t white South Africans, and closed ports of entry to asylum seekers.

Ever more hardline policies continue to be batted around the White House, with adviser Stephen Miller pushing the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell anti-ICE protests and unilaterally suspend habeas corpus for the undocumented.

The impact of these policies has been amplified over the past 20 months by the Trump administration’s quieter efforts to defund the nonprofit legal aid organizations that provide free assistance and representation for migrants. Immigration law is infamous for its impossible hours and laughable salaries, but since early 2025 the sense of purpose that animates so many immigration attorneys has been tested by the federal government’s efforts to target them—and their budgets. The ensuing chaos nearly broke them.

In the first few months of 2025, the Trump administration attempted to cancel around $267 million in federal spending on legal aid for migrants. That effort was headlined by the attempt to cancel the Unaccompanied Children Program, which provides legal representation for more than 20,000 kids by attorneys at nearly 100 organizations, but the White House didn’t stop there: It also set out to kill an initiative providing legal support for families that had been separated during the first Trump administration, as well as a suite of programs that fund basic legal orientation services for immigrants in ICE detention.

Texas’ Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services was hit particularly hard by the sudden withdrawal of federal funding. In an all-staff email sent a week after the Unaccompanied Children Program was taken offline last March, then-CEO Dolores Schroeder wrote that the contract covered more than half of RAICES’ annual budget, and its cancellation would require laying off 159 employees, adding to the 61 layoffs that had been announced a month earlier, after the Trump administration eliminated funding for refugee resettlement programs.

Georgianna Pisano Goetz recalls looking up from reading that email to see colleagues in RAICES’ Houston office just as shocked as she was. “There’s no meeting with a supervisor, no inclination around the office that this is happening,” she says. The next week, the woman who oversaw operations in Houston was gone. Goetz remembers the office feeling like “a real madhouse,” with everyone comparing notes about who else had been laid off and wondering aloud “Who’s our boss?” or “What are we supposed to do?”After the smoke cleared, less than half of RAICES employees across Texas still had jobs.

For legal aid groups all over America, recovery from the tumultuous early months of the second Trump administration has been excruciating. Some organizations, like the Florence Project and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) in Los Angeles, were able to quickly rebound from forced layoffs. Others have shrunk in the face of the MAGA onslaught at a time when their services have never been more needed.

The pressure only ratcheted up over the winter, when immigration enforcement sweeps in Chicago, New Orleans, and Minneapolis hit at the same time philanthropic sources of legal aid funding—like the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations—were being threatened with investigations from the Justice Department and the IRS. The latest body blow came in August, when a no-bid contract to administer the entirety of the Unaccompanied Children Program was awarded to a group called Our Rescue, an anti-sex-trafficking outfit that is led by a former ICE administrator and has no history of providing legal representation.

Through it all, the shifting immigration landscape has presented a succession of new hurdles. “Our work has changed dramatically,” says Lindsay Toczylowski, the leader of ImmDef. While previously much of the group’s work had been oriented around migrants claiming asylum upon reaching a port of entry, Toczylowski says the vast majority of new clients are “people who’ve lived in Southern California for 10, 20 years, most with no criminal history, many with US citizen children and grandchildren, who are being picked up through racial profiling and warrantless arrests and being thrown into detention centers.”

Pivoting from representing clients awaiting their court date while on humanitarian parole to people in detention is a massive shift, with ImmDef’s lawyers now making frequent trips to remote facilities to consult with their clients. Likewise, the summary detention of so many migrants by ICE has forced lawyers with limited expertise in immigration to learn how to file habeas corpus petitions in federal courts.

Meeting so many new challenges while scrambling for funding has only made the situation feel more dire. California, New York, and other blue states have stepped up with new grants that have allowed organizations to replenish staff over the past year, but that support still hasn’t been sufficient to alter the exhausting reality every legal aid group in America is facing: more work, less money.

The first significant wave of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border came in the late 1970s, when tens of thousands of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans fled civil war. Though some of these refugees initially received legal assistance from aid groups that dated to the civil rights movement, in 1980 Congress prohibited the federally funded Legal Services Corporation from offering its legal aid to anyone but American citizens. This meant that the legal aid groups geared solely to migrants that were founded in the ’80s (including RAICES and the Florence Project) initially relied on philanthropic or local government grants.

That began to change in 1993, when the Supreme Court ruled in that “the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”Subsequent litigation compelled the federal government to extend due process to particularly vulnerable migrants, which it mostly did by setting up block grants that legal aid groups could apply for. The most prominent of these is the Unaccompanied Children Program, which was created after a 2008 law required the government to provide counsel to children who arrive in the United States without a guardian.

These grants helped legal aid groups become more firmly established during the Obama administration, but it was only after Trump first came to power in 2017 that they really entered the public eye. That winter, ImmDef’s Toczylowski was one of the hundreds of lawyers who showed up at LAX days after Trump’s inauguration in response to his attempt to prohibit travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the country. Airport terminals packed with protesters became an early flashpoint of public resistance to Trump’s immigration regime, and groups like ImmDef used the ensuing uproar to raise the money necessary to meet the growing need for migrant legal defense.

ImmDef was raising almost $6 million a year by 2020. It was hardly the only group to find itself flush with cash. RAICES brought in more than $25 million to support its family reunification initiatives; in California, Al Otro Lado drew national attention after filing suit on behalf of six refugees whom Customs and Border Patrol refused to admit across the southern border, leading to a $2 million jump in annual revenue for the small organization.

As she prepared ImmDef staff to confront the second Trump administration in late 2024, Toczylowski put together a presentation that doubled as a highlight reel from those years. “How did we survive and thrive in the first Trump administration?”Toczylowski asked her team, which has grown to more than 200—large enough that she needed a microphone to address them. She reviewed every phase of ImmDef’s resistance, from Remain in Mexico to family separation, to remind the organization, “We were on the front lines of all of those struggles.”

Almost immediately, though, groups like ImmDef were confronting unforeseen obstacles. On day two of the new Trump administration, the nonprofit that allocates the bulk of federal funding for migrant legal aid, the Acacia Center for Justice, received a stop-work order on all of its legal orientation program grants, which totaled almost $27 million. Sara Van Hofwegen, the managing director of the Acacia Center’s legal access programs, says legal orientation initiatives previously enjoyed bipartisan support.

“They made everybody’s job easier,” she explains. The funding helped aid workers guide a detainee through the legal process by giving them a presentation or materials to review so they “can come to court saying, ‘I think I’m eligible for asylum, I want to apply.’”

Though that money was briefly restored while a court challenge played out, legal orientation was fully terminated last April. Now, Van Hofwegen says, “Those programs do not exist.”The Trump administration had more latitude to do away with the legal orientation programs than it did the three contracts with the Acacia Center that had been created by court orders or an act of Congress, including the Unaccompanied Children Program. Nevertheless, last March, the Trump administration unilaterally pulled the more than $200 million directed to those contracts. It was as shocking as it was illegal.

Several litigators, including the ACLU and ImmDef, immediately sued to reinstate all three programs administered by the Acacia Center. But with tens of millions of dollars in funding withheld, the bottom quickly fell out of a number of organizations. Lawyers soon cut clients adrift.

After the all-staff email from Dolores Schroeder, RAICES’s Georgianna Pisano Goetz says, “We had a 60-day period where they were like, ‘No new clients’—and not only no new clients, but ‘No consultations, no pro se workshops, and withdraw from every single pro bono client.’”Though the organization disseminated detailed guidelines for transferring cases, it was up to the lawyers who had been laid off to contact their clients to explain that they were going to have to withdraw from representing them.

One told me about putting together a long email detailing every case they were working on in hopes that their supervisors would find somebody to take on clients they weren’t able to personally refer to another lawyer. The attorney said they never received a response. (A RAICES spokesperson disputed this account.) In an email, Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-CEO of RAICES wrote, “Our team’s extraordinary effort last spring kept RAICES standing to serve our communities. Within days, we established a case triage and wind-down framework, issued procedural updates, led live trainings, and built robust referral systems.”

Al-Juburi said he was particularly proud that RAICES was able to maintain services for families and individuals detained at the infamous facility in Dilley, Texas. “To fulfill our mission,” he continued, “we must acknowledge that this administration is actively upending legal norms and escalating violence in communities nationwide. We bear a responsibility to adapt to this shifting landscape to safeguard our core work.”Elsewhere, not only were lawyers and social workers losing their jobs, but management appeared to be in retreat, raising fears that they, like so many other American institutions, were capitulating to Trump.

That spring, nine white-shoe law firms pledged $940 million in pro bono work to the administration, Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million to the federal government to end its probe of antisemitism on campus, and the CEOs of dozens of companies joined Trump on an official visit to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Al Otro Lado laid off eight employees and fired two more with cause—eliminating a quarter of its unionized workforce—while also pulling out of California state grants geared toward legal representation for refugees. The employees that remained became concerned that their leaders were falling in line, too, with several theorizing that, by exclusively focusing on helping migrants on the Mexican side of the border, Al Otro Lado could avoid confrontation with the Trump administration while at the same time taking advantage of Mexico’s permissive labor laws and low cost of living (management had rejected previous campaigns by the union to equalize pay between its Mexican and American lawyers).

Melissa Flores, a spokesperson for the organization, denied that any shift in priorities away from migrants in the United States was ever on the table. “Like many organizations in our field, we’ve had to navigate difficult terrain—but our focus has never wavered,” she wrote in an email. “We remain steadfast in our mission to defend and uplift the rights of immigrants, asylum seekers, and deportees on both sides of the border.”Indeed, Al Otro Lado has begun hiring again in the United States, which union members hailed as a direct result of the pressure they’ve put on the organization’s leadership. This August, management finally agreed to negotiate with the union after 18 months of resistance.

The union-management tensions at Al Otro Lado are hardly unique. Two days before Schroeder announced that RAICES had lost more than half of its budget, the organization had agreed to a wrongful-termination settlement with a union lawyer named Maria Osornio who had been fired in December 2023. A longtime leader in the group’s appeals division, Osornio had publicly protested Schroeder’s decision to wind down her office in 2024. She was terminated shortly afterward, in part for allegedly bullying another employee.

“It’s such a disservice to the people who really need our help to put ego before talent,” Osornio says. “We were spending so much time fighting with our bosses instead of focusing on the issues.”The organization found itself paying $225,000 to Osornio, and trying to heal internal tensions, at the same time the government tore a multimillion-dollar hole in its balance sheet.

Asked about the settlement with Osornio, a spokesperson for RAICES declined to comment on “specific personnel matters,” but called the timing “purely coincidental.”

A similar situation transpired in New York City last spring, when the nonprofit Bronx Defenders put an attorney named Sophia Gurulé on unpaid leave for “multiple recent performance failures,” namely a handful of late court filings. Gurulé had never faced any disciplinary action before, and soon 24 colleagues signed a protest letter to Bronx Defenders’ executive director, Juval Scott, alleging that she’d been suspended for her vocal union advocacy.

“We’ve witnessed a mind-boggling number of changes in federal regulations, agency precedent, and circuit case law that radically reshaped an already complex area of law,” the lawyers wrote. “Suspending Sophia at a time where the Immigration Practice…is hanging on by a thread is inappropriate, concerning, and harmful to staff and clients alike.”A spokesperson for Bronx Defenders said that while the organization doesn’t comment on personnel matters, “what we can say is that every decision we make is guided by our responsibility to the people we represent and the Bronx communities we serve.”

The spokesperson specifically objected to the characterization that the organization’s immigration practice had been hampered by the suspension of Gurulé, pointing out that around the same time it had secured emergency funding from New York’s city council, hired new immigration attorneys, and provided training on filing habeas corpus petitions.

The simmering tension at Bronx Defenders, RAICES, Al Otro Lado, and other organizations hasn’t stopped them from playing crucial roles in the broader fight to defend migrants in court. Still, their inability to speedily resolve whatever personnel issues arise has been a counterproductive distraction. “I want to be out there helping,” Osornio says. “That’s what’s so heartbreaking: I want to be out there advocating, but I essentially lost my job for calling out the C-suite.”

Ana Islas, from the Florence Project, was one of the few dozen supervising attorneys from all over the country who attended an Acacia Center conference in Atlanta the same weekend that the administration pulled funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program. Midway through a presentation in a hotel conference room, everyone’s phone lit up. The agenda had to be put on hold as attorneys ducked into the hall to confer with their colleagues. Waiting for her flight home to Tucson, Islas remembers sitting in the terminal with her mind racing: “The kids are here and they need to know their rights even if we’re not representing them. And if we representing them, we can’t just drop them like a hot potato.”

By and large, immigration attorneys have remained focused on that mission. “We are winning cases despite all the terrible stuff that’s happening out there,” says Chiqui Sanchez Kennedy, the leader of the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project. “We are gaining asylum for our clients. We’re getting clients released from detention.”For many attorneys, the sense of momentum felt like it began to turn in their favor last September, when the Acacia Center was finally able to begin restoring funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program after a series of court orders ended six months of uncertainty.

I talked to Van Hofwegen when the last suspended grants had been restored, but she sounded less triumphant than steely, acknowledging that more threats lay on the horizon.

“I think the cuts to federal funding are really clearly happening in this larger context of a federal government that wants to make it as difficult as possible for immigrants to navigate their legal process and who wants to remove legal access and due process as much as possible from folks,” she says.

ImmDef’s Toczylowski agreed, telling me, “It’s an assault from all angles on the organizations that serve immigrant communities.”One of the more alarming vectors of that assault is the demand by the former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), that 215 NGOs provide records to the panel about how they “benefited from the border crisis created by the Biden Administration.”

In this climate of ever-changing rules and constant threats of funding cuts, legal aid organizations cannot afford to allow internal backbiting and score settling detract from their core missions. In May, an arbitrator found that Sophia Gurulé had been unlawfully terminated under the terms of her union’s collective bargaining agreement with the Bronx Defenders, even as the arbitrator didn’t dispute the organization’s reasons for suspending her. “I feel vindicated,” Gurulé told me.

She added: “It is sad that a public defender nonprofit located in the South Bronx, historically one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, spent a year and who knows how many thousands of dollars to try to justify their bad behavior.”

Aside from a few notable exceptions, most legal aid organizations have managed to get out of their own way this year and settled into a grinding legal war with the Trump administration. That made them better prepared for the most recent assault, an overhaul of the Unaccompanied Children Program that Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, from the Florence Project, calls “monumental.”Under a new plan proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services, pro bono representation would be prioritized—a cost cutting measure that would mean detained children were working with attorneys with little immigration expertise—and all lawyers would be limited to virtual consultations with detained children.

Avila-Cimpeanu says these changes could be devastating because there’s no substitute for “being able to meet in person with the child and really having them know that we don’t work for the shelter, we don’t work for the government. We’re there for them.”

In August, the administration awarded a $158 million contract to administer the entirety of the new version of the Unaccompanied Children Program to a group called Our Rescue, whose operations are devoted to stopping sex trafficking and do not currently include any sort of legal assistance. Notably, the group is led by a former ICE official named Derek Benner and was founded by another former ICE employee, Tim Ballard. The latter is best known for being portrayed in a popular QAnon-backed anti-sex trafficking film, , which came out shortly before he himself was accused of sexual coercion by seven women. (Ballard has denied the allegations, even as he resigned from Our Rescue after they became public. Our Rescue did not respond to emailed questions about its capacity for providing legal representation to migrant children.)

At a virtual event organized by the Acacia Center a month after funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program lapsed, Michael Lukens, the head of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, rejected the idea that Our Rescue can provide the same services as organizations like his.

“Our Rescue does not do this work,” he said. “They are not qualified, and there has been no indication that that contract has been signed, that work has started, that Our Rescue has made any move to actually help a child.”That puts Lukens and his peers in the unsustainable position of working pro bono for the foreseeable future. “Where are the lawyers for the kids? Right now, they’re at the nonprofits who are doing this work without pay, and that’s because we are qualified, dedicated, mission-driven people.”

At the same time the old system for funding legal aid for migrant children has been detonated, the administration has spent the past few months illegally withholding payment for work done under the old Unaccompanied Children Program contract. This means that, yet again, nonprofits are scrambling to provide needed services. Avila-Cimpeanu says that Florence Project will find a way to continue representing its clients on a pro bono basis, a resolve shared even by lawyers at nonprofits without the same resources.

Melissa Lopez, the head of a small group in Texas called Estrella del Paso, posted a “heartbreaking update” in late July, saying that she had been forced to lay off 13 staffers because the administration was overdue on nearly $1 million in payments for completed work. Still, Lopez said, “We currently represent about 243 unaccompanied children. We have an ethical, legal, and moral obligation to continue representing these children, and with or without money from the federal government, we must do that.”

Nearly every lawyer I spoke with over the past year reflected on the reality that the Trump administration will keep finding ways to deny migrants their legal rights for as long as they’re in power. For many, finding the motivation to continue fighting requires staying connected to the clients themselves. Sanchez Kennedy, from the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, makes a point of commemorating every case with her team, even the unsuccessful ones. “We call them hard-fought losses,” she says. “Every time we help a client access due process and actively participate in their immigration case, help them defend themselves against deportation—that means that they are getting a fair shot. That alone is worth celebrating.”