Law Firm With Trump Ties Receives $150M Contract To Represent Migrant Children
It’s wild how the Trump administration is blatantly engaging in corruption, and no one is doing a thing about it. In the latest instance of Trump using taxpayer dollars to enrich his friends, the federal government has awarded a $150 million contract to a small, Texas law firm to represent migrant children who are in the U.S. without their parents.
NPR reports that the contract has been awarded to the Houston-based Burke Law Group. The firm takes its name from its co-founder, Marcella Burke, who served in the first Trump administration. Fun fact about the Burke Law Group: they don’t remotely specialize in immigration law. The firm’s website says its focus is on advising “companies on complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters.” Out of the 24 attorneys who work at the firm, only two specialize in immigration and asylum cases.
So a firm where only two people know anything about immigration law received $150 million to represent undocumented children. That totally doesn’t sound sketchy at all.
“Instead of taking care of these children, the government is instead implementing things such as awarding a contract to a private small law firm in Texas with no discernible experience in relevant immigration law or child welfare,” Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, the deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit that provided legal services to unaccompanied minors, told NPR.
What makes this even worse is that the Trump administration has allowed a contract to expire that provided funding for about 100 legal groups whose sole focus was providing representation for over 20,000 migrant children. We’re going from over 100 lawyers focused on providing representation to these children to only two.
It should come as no surprise that immigrant rights groups are concerned about what this means for undocumented children. The contract only covers 1,800 children in shelters provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, and there’s no clear information on what happens to the thousands of other children who aren’t in those shelters.
“We have no understanding of what’s going to happen to those children come next week. We don’t know if they’re going to have legal representation. The government as of yet has not identified who will take over this representation,” said Melissa Lopez, the executive director of Estrella El Paso, during a news conference earlier this week.
Since taking office, Trump has enriched himself and his friends at a dizzying rate. He launched a meme coin shortly before his inauguration and then did a crypto rug pull, which is when the founders of a coin immediately sell their tokens and devalue the coin. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the meme coin, but good luck with that.
Trump has made thousands of stock trades predicated on information he’s gained through his position and is selling early access to Truth Social posts that could impact the stock market. While the working class struggles to simply afford groceries, Trump has raked in $2.2 billion since taking office.
It’s not enough that he’s already exploited his power to enrich himself and his friends, but now he’s going to make life worse for migrant children just so one of his lawyer buddies can make a buck? It’d be nice if our politicians could remember what shame felt like.
It’s wild to me knowing that if literally any other president in history pulled what Trump is pulling, they would’ve been impeached so fast. Yet for some reason, it’s all fine for a man who is quite possibly the most corrupt leader this country has ever seen.
Make it make sense, folks.
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