26-employee Texas Law Firm Gets $150m To Represent 24,000 Children In Immigration Court

The Department of Health and Human Services quietly unveiled a multimillion-dollar contract Tuesday with a small Texas law firm, entrusting it with representing thousands of children who came by themselves to the United States during immigration court proceedings.

Per a notice set to be officially published in the Federal Register on Thursday, but posted to the website Tuesday, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the division of HHS that oversees the well-being of unaccompanied minors, will award Burke Law Group, a Houston-based law firm, a contract worth up to $150 million a year.

Burke Law Group will “provide legal orientation, legal consultation, and attorney-of-record representation services for eligible unaccompanied alien children during immigration proceedings.”

The contract will run through August of next year and will replace the existing plan for representing unaccompanied children. Until Friday, ORR had a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice, but the federal government allowed that contract to expire after months of withholding funds to Acacia, and by extension, many of the nonprofits that served as “subcontractors” and represented the majority of the children in ORR care.

Acacia and its subcontractors — which included major nonprofits such as Kids in Need of Defense as well as smaller community-based nonprofits — have represented nearly 20,000 children.

Now that responsibility will fall on a law firm with 26 employees spread across eight offices. The firm bills itself as a “boutique” firm “known for elite counsel in high-stakes litigation, environmental, regulatory, and corporate matters.” None of the lawyers for the firm list immigration law as an area of expertise, per a POLITICO review of the firm’s site.

The Burke Law Group did not immediately respond to a voicemail requesting comment.

The federal government under the provisions of a 2008 anti-human trafficking law is required to facilitate access to legal counsel for children who came to the United States by themselves. For decades, a series of nonprofits — first the Vera Institute for Justice and then Acacia — covered those needs.

But the Trump administration has had a fractious relationship with the nonprofits. In 2025, HHS first moved to cancel the contracts outright, though that effort stalled due to litigation. The administration at the end of 2025 then began withholding payment from the nonprofits after demanding that they share sensitive information about their clients with the federal government.

At the end of 2025, ORR had announced it was soliciting bids for law firms and other entities to take on the obligation of representing unaccompanied children amid its dispute with Acacia.

The contract — a single-source cooperative agreement — should in theory allow for other law firms or nonprofit legal defense groups to serve as subcontractors, though that will occur at the discretion of the Burke Law Group.