VIEW LARGER Two young children do arts and crafts at a shelter that's part of the Casa Alitas program on March 1, 2024. Immigration Attorney Ella Rawls, with Ayala Law Office and who helped start the nonprofit Arizona Justice for our Neighbors, says contracts to provide legal services are absolutely vital to ensuring children of all ages are not wrongly returned into situations of violence or abuse.
“Generally speaking, in immigration proceedings, the government does not pay for representation,” she says. “This is one of those small areas where there had been funding to support children and that's because they are an especially vulnerable group of our community.”
The Florence and Immigrant Refugee Rights Project says through the congressionally appropriated Unaccompanied Children Program, they have been providing age-appropriate education to children about the legal process and their rights, as well as legal representation and that 26,000 children, as young as infants, could now lose their attorneys.
“Not only are we talking about children who maybe are fleeing their home country because of violence in their home country or past persecution, but we're also talking about children who may have been abused, abandoned or neglected in their home country by their parents,” Rawls says.
More than 90-thousand unaccompanied minors have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border into the country in the last year, nearly a quarter of which was in Arizona.
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