Over 425,000 Kids (all NonWhite) Face Deportation Hearings w/o Lawyers. Their Parents were Arrested for Crossing an Imaginary Border to Flee Extreme Poverty and Obtain Better Economic Opportunities

A new analysis of federal immigration data, conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice in response to questions from Drop Site News, shows that children like Hoyos-Gomez are not an anomaly but part of a wider pattern. More than half of all children facing pending immigration cases are doing so without legal representation, according to data from the Department of Justice. The analysis shows that legal representation appears to be one of the most important factors shaping children’s outcomes in immigration court.

Of 751,861 children with pending removal cases, 57%—or 425,093 children—lacked legal representation, according to the most recent data. This rate is slightly higher than that of adults, 54% of whom are unrepresented in immigration court in pending cases. Nearly two thirds of children’s cases that are still pending were initiated by the federal government in 2023, under the Biden administration. The gap widens in completed cases. Last year, 64% of children’s completed immigration cases went forward without legal representation.

The data, from the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), indicates that children under the age of 18 are increasingly appearing in immigration court without lawyers at a time when deportation orders are surging as the Trump administration attempts to deport more than a million people annually and immigration relief is becoming harder to obtain. The Vera Institute analysis could not determine how many of these children are unaccompanied, because EOIR data does not distinguish between accompanied and unaccompanied children.

Former judges, attorneys, and advocates interviewed by Drop Site describe an immigration court system under mounting pressure to move cases quickly, straining due process protections for the most vulnerable. [MORE]