Legal assistance for immigrants facing court proceedings is dwindling, including for children, in the Los Angeles court systems after the Trump administration ended a federal $28 million contract with nonprofit agencies that provided assistance in California and other states, according to a new report.
"There is no help anywhere," Moises Morales, a 28-year-old Salvadoran appearing Tuesday in the West Los Angeles Immigration Court, told The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.
The administration's moves, which also added $150 billion for immigration and border enforcement, mean that the programs that supplied help desks for immigrants or legal orientation programs for people in custody were either canceled or are now operated by the government, while arrest numbers are climbing.
"It doesn't feel like an accident to me that the government kicked out the legal service providers who are providing basic information and support to people in court, and then started arresting and deporting people in court," said Sara Van Hofwegen, a lawyer for Acacia Center for Justice, which oversees nonprofits and lawyers providing legal services for immigrants.
Such groups had another setback earlier this month after a ruling by U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington, who ruled that the Trump administration can discontinue contracts and bring the services under the control of the government.
Advocacy groups, which are appealing the decision, said decades of work are being taken apart, while the administration is seeking to cut off ways for migrants to find a path to being in the United States legally.
"It means that people are getting picked up and detained and deported without any sort of due process or really any way to access basic legal information rights to help them understand their situation and help them advocate for themselves," Van Hofwegen commented.
The Department of Justice and the Executive Office for Immigration Review declined to comment to the Times.
However, taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill for illegal immigrants, said Matthew O'Brien, deputy executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
"U.S. taxpayers, who are already straining under unreasonable burdens, should not be expected to cover the massive costs for legal aid programs that do little other than unreasonably and unnecessarily prolong removal proceedings," he said.
O'Brien added that by decommissioning programs, EOIR is eliminating spending that was "of highly dubious legality in the first place."
The government is no longer providing funding for help desks in the courts, some representation for children, or orientations for families of children facing deportation hearings.
Instead, the government says it is taking over the orientation program for people who have been detained and for the custodians of minors.
But immigration advocates claim that the government has tapered back the programs to the point that they are "functionally terminated."
Meanwhile, asylum-seeking immigrants who do not have an attorney only won their cases 19% of the time, according to a 2024 congressional report, but those who had a lawyer prevailed in 60% their proceedings.
The Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, which had run a legal help desk in Los Angeles and Orange County immigration courts, has been flooded with calls, said Evelyn Cedeño-Naik, an attorney with the program.
"The contracts have been terminated, but the need is still there," she commented. "People are very, very scared. We are seeing it every day."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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