When a Denver immigration judge asked a little boy no more than 5 years old if he had an attorney, the boy’s brother, just a couple of years older, stepped forward and held his hand, volunteering for the task.
That scene is burned into Emily Brock’s brain, she said.
Brock, the children’s program deputy managing attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, remembered sitting in Denver Immigration Court years ago, witnessing the unaccompanied children without legal representation gripping each other as a judge asked them, through a translator, to recount their traumatic journeys to the United States.
The advocacy network, known as RMIAN, was designed to help kids like them — unaccompanied minors making their way through a federal immigration court that is not required to provide counsel to people who can’t afford attorneys, unlike defendants who are guaranteed representation in the criminal justice system.
But due to the Trump administration’s funding cuts, the 25-year-old organization described by local immigration attorney Violeta Chapin as the “largest and most well-resourced nonprofit organization supporting immigrants in Colorado” had to freeze the program.
Now, aside from limited exceptions, RMIAN must turn away immigrant youth who have come to the country unaccompanied, forcing children — in some cases not yet old enough to speak in complete sentences — to endure immigration court proceedings alone, Brock said.
“What we’re in effect doing is forcing children to grow up before they’re ready to grow up,” Brock said. “You’ll have older children say, ‘I’ll speak. I’ll tell the judge our story,’ to protect their younger siblings. They should just be children who have suffered traumatic experiences and now arrived at safety with adults who are stepping in to say, ‘I will now protect you and help you navigate it.’ And instead we’re saying, ‘Good luck.’ ”
This year, RMIAN lost $1 million in long-standing federal funding, said Mekela Goehring, the organization’s executive director.
For more than 20 years, Congress funded, through the U.S. Department of Justice, programs across the country that gave unrepresented people in immigration proceedings access to basic legal information, she said. RMIAN was part of the initial pilot project in 2003. But these programs have all been terminated, Goehring said.
As a result, the nonprofit froze hiring, cut programming and scaled back operations at a time when the demand for its services has never been higher, she said.
“There have been major increases in immigration enforcement and detention, loss of vital legal protections, increases in fear and attacks on the immigrant community, exponential increases on removals, unlawful removals and, on top of all of that, RMIAN has seen deep losses in funding to all of our work,” Goehring said. “You’re starting with a deeply unjust and unfair process where there isn’t a whole lot of due process, and what we’ve seen is that all those hardships have been compounded because of a series of both policy and legal decisions the federal government has made.”
Due to the funding cuts, RMIAN also terminated a program in which its attorneys held group “know your rights” presentations at the Aurora immigration detention center.
The program existed for more than 20 years, Goehring said, with bipartisan support from multiple administrations. Now, RMIAN attorneys have to educate people detained in the facility on a one-on-one basis.
Instead of informing between 200 to 300 immigrants every month, Goehring said RMIAN attorneys are only able to meet with about 40 to 60 people per month and provide them information that could prove useful as they navigate the complex immigration court system.
“These programs connected people who can’t afford private attorneys to pro bono counsel,” Goehring said. “Congress has repeatedly funded it and both immigration judges as well as numerous studies have said these programs are vitally important to ensure fairness and also for immigration court efficiences, because if people understand their rights, they’re much more likely to not ask for continuance after continuance.”
According to a 2016 report from the American Immigration Council, 37% of immigrants nationally secured legal representation in their removal cases, and only 14% of detained immigrants had attorneys. Detained immigrants who had legal representation were four times more likely to be released from detention, the report found.
Colorado has among the lowest rates in the nation of immigrants with legal representation, with about 85% of immigrants in the state representing themselves in court, according to a 2023 analysis by the Colorado Fiscal Institute.
“It’s really difficult because RMIAN was taking the most clients for many years and being able to assist the most,” Chapin said. “Colorado does not hold up well in terms of most other states in terms of nonprofit legal representation for immigrants. Most other states have more nonprofit organizations helping people for free or low cost. RMIAN is suffering a significant blow, and that means we have even less representation.”
For a system that’s confusing to adults, Brock said, imagine the difficulty for a child trying to fight for their rights without any help.
RMIAN has more than 900 active client cases, Goehring said, with around 800 of those in the unaccompanied minors program.
“What this administration would have children do is proceed through court alone and tell the court the most traumatic events that have ever happened to them in their lives without developing rapport with an attorney,” Brock said. “When you have attorneys specifically trained in immigration law working with children, they spend months allowing that child to feel safe enough to reveal they’re currently in a dangerous situation and need help getting out. We’ve had that happen on a number of occasions with a child finally asking us for help.”
The unaccompanied children are frequently escaping political or domestic violence, Brock said. They either seek safety in the U.S. foster care system or reunification with a family member in the country.
RMIAN no longer has the capacity to take on new kids’ cases. If a child manages to find RMIAN’s information while seeking resources, the organization has to turn them away and give them a list of other attorneys they might be able to contact.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Brock said.
Chapin, a University of Colorado Boulder associate dean and clinical professor of law, runs an immigration clinic out of CU’s law school.
RMIAN’s scaling back of services has impacted the clinic, too, she said, because the network often sends Chapin referrals for clients in need of help. If RMIAN can’t help as many immigrants, then the clinic receives fewer referrals, Chapin said.
RMIAN is looking for volunteer attorneys, interpreters, translators, medical doctors and mental health professionals to better serve their clients, along with donations that could assist the organization in continuing its work, Goehring said.
Even if a child can fill out an asylum application — which is a confusing document in English — the applications frequently get rejected for things like grammatical errors or missed questions.
“We’re sending children through this process without an adult to sit by their side,” Brock said. “That’s all we’re asking… is to just have someone to be able to enable children to have an adult sitting by their side.”
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