Second Migrant-Child Legal Contract Goes to Anti-Trafficking Group Facing Sex-Trafficking Lawsuit, as Texas Law Firm Drops Its Own $150M Deal

Since the Trump administration ended its contract with the Acacia Center for Justice on July 31, cutting off funding for roughly 100 legal service providers that represented more than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children, the fight over who replaces that network has taken two more turns.

Burke Law Group, the small Houston-based firm that HHS tapped in early August for a $150 million contract to represent migrant children, has withdrawn from consideration. The firm said in a social media post Tuesday that it was approached by the Trump administration "to fill a gap in legal services," sought only a smaller slice of the grant, and then backed out, according to the Washington Post.

HHS didn't wait long to find another taker. The department's Office of Refugee Resettlement announced late last week a $158 million contract with Our Rescue, a nonprofit focused on fighting child trafficking, according to the Washington Examiner, which cited Washington Post reporting.

A founder facing his own trafficking lawsuit

Our Rescue was founded by Tim Ballard, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement employee whose anti-trafficking work inspired the 2023 film "Sound of Freedom." Ballard stepped down from the organization in 2023, shortly before five women filed a federal lawsuit in 2024 accusing him of sex trafficking and forced labor. That lawsuit remains ongoing, the Washington Examiner reported. No verdict or settlement has been reported in these sources, and the allegations remain unproven in court.

Our Rescue's current executive is Derek Benner, the former head of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division. The organization's website, which as of the Washington Examiner's reporting made no mention of the new federal contract, describes its mission as working "hand-in-hand with law enforcement, local communities, and global partners to confront exploitation and human trafficking head-on."

Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the federal government is legally required to fund attorneys for unaccompanied children in deportation proceedings. For nearly two decades, that funding went to established immigration-law nonprofits. Handing it instead to a trafficking-focused group led by people with ICE and Homeland Security Investigations backgrounds, rather than immigration defense experience, marks a departure from precedent that the Washington Examiner flagged directly.

Why Acacia turned down a second contract

HHS has defended the funding shift by pointing to a contract dispute, not just a policy choice. The department told the Guardian, as reported by Michigan Public, that ORR offered Acacia a second "bridge contract" that would have required legal providers to report data on their clients and bill the government per case.

Acacia and its local partners said that arrangement would force attorneys to breach attorney-client privilege. Ana Devereaux, senior managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said the terms "would require attorneys to violate attorney-client privilege and their ethical duties of confidentiality to clients" and that no lawyer could sign on "while maintaining their law license." That's a specific, professional-ethics objection, not a vague political complaint, and it deserves to be taken at face value alongside HHS's stated rationale that it wanted more accountability and billing transparency from providers receiving federal money.

The practical fallout is already landing. The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center said Tuesday it is closing more than half of its nearly 950 active children's cases because the federal funding that supported them expired at the end of July. It says it will keep representing over 400 children using emergency funds, but its capacity is shrinking.

The scale of the gap

Fewer than 1% of unaccompanied immigrant children win immigration relief without a lawyer, according to figures cited by the Acacia Center for Justice. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement that children as young as six will now appear in immigration court "across the aisle" from trained government attorneys with no counsel of their own.

Advocacy groups including the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, and the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project held a press briefing warning that replacing experienced child-representation nonprofits with unqualified or mismatched organizations amounts to a functional end of meaningful legal defense for these kids. Michael Lukens of the Amica Center called it part of a pattern "from family separation to cutting off legal services for children."

HHS has not publicly responded to questions about whether Our Rescue has experience litigating immigration cases for minors, and the organization's website gives no indication it has handled deportation defense work before. Whether Our Rescue can staff and execute a nationwide legal-representation contract on the same scale Acacia's network did, and how it will handle the active lawsuit against its founder while operating under a federal government contract, remain open questions HHS has not yet addressed on the record.