Tiny Defendants, Towering Indictments

When a government cross-examines children and calls it justice, the republic courts its own contempt.

Illustration (Donny Evans)

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She is four years old. She has no lawyer. No parent. No translator.

She holds a coloring book. She stands before a federal judge.

She is asked to explain why she should not be deported.

This is not allegory. This is not satire. This is America’s immigration court system under the Trump administration—where baroque cruelty gave way to something colder, quieter, bureaucratic: children forced to argue their cases before the state.

The premise is so grotesque it invites disbelief. But disbelief is a luxury that policy no longer affords.

When due process is reduced to performance—when the state relinquishes even the fiction of protection—what remains is not law, but ritualized abandonment. It is the civic equivalent of trial by fire, in which innocence is not presumed, but incinerated.

One need not be a legal scholar to see the obscenity here—only a sentient adult.

And yet this is precisely where our republic has arrived: a place where the burden of justice rests on children small enough to disappear behind a courtroom bench.

In February 2025, the Trump administration reached for the bureaucratic guillotine and let it fall on 26,000 children.

With a single stop-work order, it terminated a $200 million federal contract with the Acacia Center for Justice—the nonprofit tasked with providing legal representation to unaccompanied migrant minors.

No hearing. No vote. No press conference. Just a memo. The clinical sound of the knife.

What was dismantled was not a program. It was a lifeline. A scaffold of due process built to protect children who had crossed borders not out of ambition, but desperation.

These were not “illegals.” They were minors—many victims of trafficking, war, or gang violence, much of it born from hemispheric instability we helped create.

But in the cold calculus of this administration, the right to legal counsel became a luxury. And cruelty—an efficiency.

This was not the act of a government navigating fiscal tradeoffs. It was a declaration: that the law, when inconvenient, should be amputated. And what better way to demonstrate that than by depriving the defenseless of their final defense?

This is not immigration policy. It is the legalized torment of the voiceless, in a country where silence is no longer a symptom—but a strategy.

The backlash came swiftly. Within three days, the order was rescinded after a flurry of media coverage and public outrage.

But this was not repentance. It was choreography.

By March, the White House quietly returned—not with a scalpel, but with a cleaver—slashing access to legal aid across the board.

The stop-work order may have been reversed.

The intent—was not.

This was not about miscommunication. It was about message.

By stripping children of legal counsel, the administration did not merely ease deportations. It obliterated the adversarial process.

A child without a lawyer is not a participant in court. She is a prop in a pageant. A performance designed to mimic legality while dispensing with its burdens. And in that performance, the government plays every role but the one it owes most: guardian.

In a courtroom on Varick Street, a dozen migrant children appear on a government Webex screen—alone. They are not accompanied by parents or attorneys, only by shelter workers who helped them log on.

One girl clutches a pink plush toy and hides it in her sleeve. Her older sister, in a tie-dye shirt, squeezes her hand.

A 7-year-old boy spins a toy windmill on his lap as the judge begins to speak.

“The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States,” says Judge Ubaid ul-Haq.

“It’s my job to figure out if you have to leave. It’s also my job to figure out if you should stay.”

To whom is he speaking, exactly?

A four-year-old? An eight-year-old in a tie-dye shirt? A boy in a pizza tee?

Immigration court, unlike criminal court, offers no guarantee of counsel.

And so the federal government, armed with lawyers and case officers, squares off against children whose only preparation for this moment is a shelter breakfast and a plush toy.

This is not a miscarriage of justice. It is its autopsy.

Even the ancients, for all their cruelty, spared children the burden of the law.

Even Kafka, in his darkest allegories, never conceived of a bureaucracy so unfeeling it would hold a legal hearing for a child who still needs help tying her shoes.

And yet this is not fiction. It is American immigration policy—deliberate, designed, and televised.

In April 2025, a federal judge in California issued an injunction—temporarily restoring legal services to unaccompanied children.

The ruling cited likely violations of the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. It was a necessary correction. But it was not a cure.

For every court order, there is a workaround. For every judicial slap, an executive shrug. This was not institutional strength. It was an act of emergency resuscitation.

A legal system in which children must rely on a judge’s temporary ruling just to speak in their own defense is not a functioning democracy. It is an empire of luck.

And it leaves one to wonder: what happens when luck runs out?

Congress, for its part, mostly vanished. There were a few dissenters—Senators Jon Ossoff and Lisa Murkowski chief among them—who publicly condemned the administration’s actions.

Their statement was urgent. Correct. Entirely ignored.

The rest of Congress chose the path of least exposure.

Not paralysis—permission.

This is not gridlock. It is complicity by cowardice. Every senator who remained silent did not merely fail these children. They confirmed that the comfort of incumbency outweighs the cost of conscience. If cruelty is now bipartisan, it is only because neutrality made it so.

To defend these children would mean standing against cruelty. And to stand against cruelty, in this America, is to risk being labeled weak. Better, it seems, to let the toddlers take the heat.

Congress will be in recess.

This is not an isolated event. It is doctrine.

The attack on legal aid is part of a sweeping, scorched-earth strategy: family detention. The floated repeal of birthright citizenship. The use of pain as deterrent.

Under this administration, immigration enforcement has become a kind of theater. But the ritual is cruelty. And the liturgy is fear.

This is not policy for the sake of protection. It is punishment for the sake of performance. The child becomes the sermon. The courtroom, the pulpit. And the absence of counsel—a political sacrament.

This is not border control. It is state-sponsored sadism, with paperwork.

We end where we began: a four-year-old girl, alone before the court. No lawyer. No voice. No chance.

This is not a failure of process. It is its grotesque evolution. The robes remain. The gavels sound. But justice is nowhere in the room.

Outside the courtroom, a child’s plush toy lies forgotten on the floor.

Inside, the hearing continues—without her.

The Trump administration did not hide this. It televised it. It dared us to look away.

And look away we did.

Because to look directly at this—to accept what it means for our courts, our Constitution, our soul—is to confront something irreconcilable.

The question is no longer what this government is willing to do.

That’s been answered.

The question is whether we will continue to watch—and call it democracy.