08/06/2026
This is sad, insane, and the cruelest. It’s how people who dehumanize other humans, who are unlike them, behave.
BREAKING🚨 The nonprofits representing more than 20,000 migrant children just LOST their contract. Trump handed the $150 million replacement to a 26-person Houston firm with virtually no immigration lawyers.
The firm is Burke Law Group, and until this week its own website described its specialty as advising companies on "complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters." After the award was announced, immigration was quietly added to the practice list. Its other lines of work: white-collar defense, commercial litigation, securities litigation.
The federal notice calls it a "single source cooperative agreement." That means the administration picked the firm with no competitive bidding, and offered no justification for skipping it.
Who runs it matters. Founder Marcella Burke was a Trump appointee at the EPA and the Interior Department. Founding partner Jeffrey Hall now serves as an assistant EPA administrator. Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro is listed as senior counsel. Also on the roster: Justin Shubow, the leading champion of Trump's push to force federal buildings into classical architecture.
The children on the other side of this are as young as toddlers who haven't learned to speak yet, and federal law has required the government to facilitate lawyers for them for decades, precisely because they can be trafficked and abused. Without a real lawyer, deportation is close to automatic.
The network that did this work — nearly 100 legal nonprofits representing more than 20,000 kids, lost its contract last Friday. Burke's doesn't begin until August 15. As Michael Lukens of the Amica Center put it, "technically nobody in the country has a contract with HHS to provide services to kids."
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