It didn’t cause much of a news ripple when it was announced last week that Mid-South Immigration Advocates (MIA) will close its doors in September. But it should have. It’s a development that especially impacts the least of us: unaccompanied immigrant minors. These are children under 18 who have no family support and who are often living in group homes run by nonprofit organizations that help them with shelter, healthcare, and, equally important, attorneys to represent them and negotiate their cases in immigration court.
Mid-South Immigration Advocates has performed those functions and others while serving immigrant communities in Nashville and Memphis for the past 13 years, so why are they closing their doors? Because the federal government has reneged on its obligation to fund the group for the $500,000 it has owed them for the past seven months’ work. Shocker, I know.
Here’s MIA director Sally Joyner, as quoted in the Daily Memphian: “The federal government has refused to pay the legal service providers on its unaccompanied minors contract for the past seven months. We’ve had to spend our reserves in order to pay staff and continue our work. And we just cannot do that anymore.”
It’s the local angle on a development that is having a similar impact all over the United States. And it’s not an accident. It’s the latest manifestation of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants, and this time they’re going after the most vulnerable population group in the country: the 26,000 immigrant children who are on their own — or in legal terminology, “unaccompanied.”
Here’s what happened: In March 2025, the Trump administration cancelled a $65 million contract that had provided funding to the nonprofit organization Acacia Center for Justice, which would have dispersed the money to nonprofits around the country like Mid-South Immigration Advocates for the specific purpose of providing attorneys to represent unaccompanied minors in their immigration cases. The contract officially ended July 31st, but in a particularly mean-spirited twist, the feds never paid the $65 million they owed Acacia for the work done since spring of 2025, meaning many attorneys won’t be paid, and that there is almost no funding for legal help for these children.
Now, quite literally, an abandoned 8-year-old child will be forced to go to court to present their asylum case to a judge. How well do you think that kid will fare against a government attorney intent on fulfilling the Trump/Stephen Miller “quota” for deportations?
The administration is also beginning to send unaccompanied minors from all over the country to holding facilities in Texas — away from their local support organizations and their attorneys, to a state that is set up with Trump-friendly judges who will quickly deport minors.
Let this sink in: The government that represents you and me will be dumping unaccompanied children into another country to fend for themselves — exposing them to hunger, homelessness, sex traffickers, and other exploiters. This is who we are now. This is the new American way.
And there’s more. The administration is also sending pregnant unaccompanied minors from around the country to a single group shelter in the small border town of San Benito, Texas. According to a report from Houston PBS affiliate KUHT, the decision was made over objections from health and child welfare officials, who say the facility lacks the specialized care the girls need. Some are as young as 13, and at least half of them became pregnant as a result of rape, PBS sources said. Migrant advocates and civil rights attorneys suspect the administration is putting children at the San Benito shelter to deny them access to abortion by locating them in a state where it’s virtually banned.
Here’s Melissa Lopez, director of Estrella El Paso, an unaccompanied-minor support facility, as quoted by the AP: “We have no understanding of what’s going to happen to those children come next week. … The government is trying to eliminate our work in this program because they know that without attorneys these children will be deported.” Precisely the point.
On a personal note, my wife is an immigration attorney who represents unaccompanied minors. She has seen firsthand every day the impacts of this administration’s cruel policies on children. I’ve heard her stories about the trauma caused by this policy. It is inhumane. It is un-American. People, we have to pay attention to this stuff. We have to do better.
