Inside the New York court where children face deportation without access to attorneys

About 20,000 unaccompanied minors will lose legal representation if the federal government ends a longstanding contract on Friday, kicking current problems into overdrive across US Inside an immigration court in lower Manhattan, the faces of migrant children – some as young as three – have been beamed on to a video screen throughout the summer as they faced deportation hearings. Most appeared virtually. Some sat around desks in a classroom, others bounced on bunk beds or rocked in chairs inside small offices or storage closets. Detained in nearby shelters for unaccompanied minors in New York, the vast majority did not have lawyers as they appeared before the court. Internal federal regulations have long barred deportation proceedings from moving ahead when children don’t have legal representation, and federal law requires the government to make every effort to fund those attorneys or assure pro bono counsel. But inside the courtroom of Judge Lisa W Ling, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prosecutor appointed to the court by Donald Trump in 2018 during his first term as US president, none of those safeguards seemed to matter. Over a series of hearings observed by th