Assessing Access to Legal Representation for Unaccompanied Migrant Children: National,State,and County-Level Analysis of Free- and Low-Cost Attorney Prevalence in Relation to Children’s Locations

Executive Summary

This study presents the first effort to assess unaccompanied migrant children’s access to free and low-cost attorneys in the United States at the national, state, and county levels. Since 2021, over 544,000 unaccompanied children have entered the United States and been apprehended along the southwest border. The vast majority of these children are transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and released to sponsors across the country while their immigration cases are processed. While unaccompanied children are not guaranteed the right to government appointed counsel, a broad body of research indicates that having legal representation greatly increases the likelihood that a child will identify a form of legal relief and will have a legal outcome that allows them to remain in the country. Access to legal representation additionally connects children with trusted adults and increases opportunities to identify and address instances where children are being abused or exploited. However, a large percentage of unaccompanied children still lack legal representation. To date, little research has explored the factors that support or inhibit unaccompanied children’s access to representation. This study draws on research that shows that geographic proximity to attorneys is one key factor affecting the likelihood that immigrants will obtain counsel and research that demonstrates dramatic unevenness in legal counsel nationally to assess the prevalence of free and low-cost immigration attorneys in relation to where unaccompanied children are released to sponsors. Our findings demonstrate an overall lack of free and low-cost immigration attorneys in relation to the number of unaccompanied children in need of legal representation, with only one attorney for every 137 children nationally. Moreover, in assessing attorney to child ratios at the state-scale, we demonstrate that in 43 states (86 percent of the states in the country) the number of children to attorneys exceeds reasonable caseloads. Importantly, these estimates do not account for the fact that not all free and low-cost immigration attorneys take on children’s cases nor for the overall demand for immigration legal services among the more than three million individuals facing deportation in the United States. In turn, while sobering, our estimates likely significantly over-estimate children’s actual access to representation across the United States. Based on these findings, we offer the following policy recommendations:

Federal, state, local, and philanthropic organizations should strategically invest in workforce development to grow the number of free and low-cost immigration attorneys in general and specifically in areas where the lack is particularly high.