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us department of the interior
'Vulnerable Children' at Risk as Trump Halts Legal Aid for Unaccompanied Migrant Youth
The move was denounced by one immigrant rights advocate as "an affront to American values."
Feb 19, 2025
Migrant rights advocates are forcefully denouncing the Trump administration's move this week to cut off legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children.
Multiple organizations said Tuesday that they had received a "stop-work order" emailed from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Among them was Acacia Center for Justice. CBS News' Camilo Montoya-Galvez shared a partly redacted copy on social media.
"Acacia's Unaccompanied Children Program provides legal representation to over 26,000 children in and released from Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, protecting children from trafficking, abuse, and exploitation, helping immigration courts run smoother, and ensuring a modicum of due process, so that children navigating the immigration system alone understand their rights and legal obligations," the group's executive director, Shaina Aber, said in a Tuesday statement.
"This decision flies in the face of ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests," Aber continued. "The administration's decision to suspend this program undermines due process, disproportionately impacts vulnerable children, and puts children who have already experienced severe trauma at risk for further harm or exploitation."
Immigrant Defenders Law Center president and CEO Lindsay Toczylowski similarly said Tuesday that "the safety and welfare of children in government custody should be the primary concern of our elected leaders. Today's decision by the Trump administration to eliminate access to counsel for 26,000 children is an affront to American values. The Trump administration is abandoning children for the sake of politics and leaving kids to fend for themselves against our complex immigration system."
According toMother Jones, in addition to causing about 26,000 children to lose their legal representation—absent outside funding—the new order will lead to about 100,000 kids "missing out on programs designed to educate them about their rights."
President Donald Trump is known globally for forcibly separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during his first term and last year campaigned on various harsh immigration policies, including mass deportations and ending birthright citizenship. Since returning to office last month, the Republican has taken steps to enact his anti-immigrant agenda.
"Trump's decision to slash a 20-year-old program meant to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us will only cause more chaos in our immigration courts and violates our commitment to children's safety," said Toczylowski. "We will continue to fight for their right to legal representation and to uphold our ethical and professional obligations. We urge the government to restore services immediately to protect children's rights. Our government will be judged by how it treats children in its care. By all standards, this administration is failing them and self-inflicting a black eye as the rest of the world watches."
National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) executive director Mary Meg McCarthy said Tuesday that "the Trump administration continues to choose politics over the rule of law and cruelty over humane treatment of children." She also said that "this denial of congressionally appropriated funding violates federal law," and mirrors Trump's "mass firings and funding cuts of essential programs and agencies across the U.S. government."
As McCarthy explained:
Decades ago, Congress passed the bipartisan Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) that recognized the unique vulnerability of children who travel alone to seek protection in the United States. The TVPRA codified the federal government's obligation to ensure these children have legal representation so they do not face the risk of deportation without due process. Most unaccompanied children are eligible for permanent status in the United States under current laws. Attorneys help them safeguard their rights under U.S. law, connect them to essential services, and shield them from exploitation and trafficking
[...]
Last month, NIJC and other legal service providers successfully sued the Trump administration following the unlawful stoppage of another congressionally funded legal service program. The administration's failure yet again to uphold its legal and ethical duties does not eliminate NIJC attorneys' ethical obligations to the hundreds of children we've committed to represent. We call on members of Congress to vocally oppose this egregious abuse of power by the executive branch.
The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center wrote in a lengthy email about the order that "MIRC condemns this cruel action from the Trump administration, designed to inflict further suffering on vulnerable children and families," including victims of labor trafficking and child abuse.
MIRC also noted that "abruptly terminating statutorily mandated services violates the TVPRA, as well as the government's clear obligations to children that it has otherwise agreed to during litigation, including the Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) and the relatively recent Ms. L v. ICE settlement designed to prevent family separation, among other critical protections."
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Critics Warn Trump Picks for EPA and Interior Would Only Serve Billionaire Polluters
Climate advocates are sounding the alarm over nominees Doug Burgum and Lee Zeldin.
Jan 16, 2025
As Republican-controlled Senate committees held Thursday morning confirmation hearings for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's picks to lead the Department of the Interior and Environmental Protection Agency, climate advocates warned that the pair would serve billionaire polluters, endangering the American people, the nation's natural resources, and the planet.
Republican North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump's choice for interior secretary, appeared before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, while former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin, his nominee for EPA administrator, met with the chamber's Committee on Environment and Public Works.
"Doug Burgum, the billionaire governor of North Dakota, bought his way into Trump's orbit by launching a long-shot presidential campaign with his fortune from selling his software company to Microsoft," said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, in a statement. "Burgum is also a real estate and technology investor who leases his own land for oil exploration to Continental Resources, run by close Trump ally Harold Hamm."
As Accountable.US, another watchdog, pointed out, Burgum also leases his land to Hess and "reportedly played a major role in facilitating an infamous meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Donald Trump and a handful of big oil CEOs," including Hamm.
Also highlighting the nominee's reported role in the Florida event "where plutocrats were asked to donate a billion dollars to Trump in exchange for gutting environmental protections," Athan Manuel, director of Sierra Club's Lands Protection Program, quipped that "if Doug Burgum got any closer to the oil and gas industry, he'd need to wear a hard hat."
"It's clear who would benefit from him running the Department of the Interior," Manuel said. "For more than a century, our national parks and public lands and waters have been part of what makes us special as a country. The incoming Trump administration wants to give those lands and waters away to corporate polluters and billionaires. We need to protect every inch of our public lands from corporate interests and polluters so future generations can explore the treasured lands that connect us all."
Slocum similarly said that "his extensive corporate ties ensure that the Interior Department would be led by a Big Oil lackey who will prioritize the American Petroleum Institute over the American people," and "would open up the door for massive exploitation of the nation's public lands for oil, gas, coal, and mining."
"Trump has named Burgum to lead a new White House energy council, potentially named the National Energy Dominance Council," Slocum noted, citing Politico. He also pointed out that Trump has "given the interior secretary a role on the National Security Council for the first time," warning that the president-elect may use "a bogus national energy emergency" to push dirty energy.
Slocum's colleague David Arkush, director of Public Citizen's Climate Program, expressed similar concerns about Zeldin, saying that if allowed to become EPA administrator, he "would turn the agency on its head and run it for the benefit of billionaire polluters at the expense of the American people."
"In Congress, Zeldin voted repeatedly against measures to protect our environment and fix the climate crisis, and Trump says he is counting on Zeldin for 'swift deregulatory decisions,'" Arkush stressed, pointing to Zeldin's pledge "to use the EPA to 'pursue energy dominance.'"
"The U.S. is already the largest producer of petroleum products in history, is the world's largest fossil gas producer, and is exporting gas at record levels," he noted. "What's left to dominate except American families—attacking their health and pocketbooks while setting their homes on fire in pursuit of ever more fossil fuel profits?"
"The Senate should reject Trump's shameful pro-polluter, pro-billionaire, anti-environment, anti-American-people nominees," Arkush argued. Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce also urged senators to reject Zeldin, to "protect the lives and livelihoods of this and all future generations."
"He has failed to adequately address the very real threat climate change poses to our nation as the American people wake each day to more deadly fires, more flooding, and dangerous record temperatures stealing more of our lives and land each day," Pierce said of Zeldin, nodding to the fires raging in California and calling out his record in Congress.
In addition to opposing money for the national flood insurance program and voting to drastically slash EPA funding, "Zeldin has called for the repeal of standards that protect clean air and clean water," she continued. "Him ascending to a role that would allow him to do polluters' bidding from within the agency tasked with administering and enforcing those protections makes him a threat to us all."
After Zeldin's hearing, Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said that he "was asked several questions about fossil fuel industry propaganda campaigns, as well as the absurd theories spread by President Trump regarding our environment and the planet. At every turn, Zeldin danced around the questions. It is clear that Zeldin will be a rubber stamp for industry priorities, jeopardizing clean air and water, and driving up costs for everyday families."
Confirmation hearings for Trump's energy & environment teams are this week. Lee Zeldin has promised to eliminate key environmental regulations. Chris Wright is notorious for cherry-picking data to defend the fossil fuel industry. Doug Burgum supports increased fossil fuel drilling.
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— Earthjustice (@earthjustice.bsky.social) January 13, 2025 at 9:52 AM
This week has featured a flurry of hearings for Trump nominees—including Tuesday events for Fox News host and former Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy, the president-elect's pick to lead the Department of Transportation, and Chris Wright, a fracking CEO and promoter of climate disinformation on track to be the next energy secretary.
Duffy and Wright have provoked intense criticism from climate groups—including members of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, who held a protest at Wright's hearing during which 10 campaigners were arrested.
"Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright are unqualified to serve in these critical environmental positions," Allie Rosenbluth, United States program manager at Oil Change International, said last week. "With Zeldin and Burgum each receiving hundreds of thousands in fossil fuel campaign money and Wright's position as a fracking CEO, their loyalties lie with industry profits, not protecting Americans' air, water, climate, and working-class families. These men will choose items off the fossil fuel industry's wishlist over the good of the American people every time."
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Thursday
introduced a bill that would ban former oil, gas, and coal executives or lobbyists from multiple federal posts—including EPA administrator and secretaries of energy, the interior, and transportation—for a decade after leaving their private sector jobs.
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Biden Offshore Drilling Plan Continues 'Dangerous Cycle'
"Offshore oil and gas drilling is not only dirty and dangerous, but it also supercharges the existing climate crisis," said one campaigner.
Dec 15, 2023
The Biden administration on Friday finalized a five-year plan for offshore fossil fuel leasing that was initially released in September and sharply condemned as a "climate nightmare."
The Department of the Interior (DOI) highlighted in a statement Friday that the 2024-29 National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program has the fewest sales in history, with just three for the Gulf of Mexico set to be held in 2025, 2027, and 2029.
The DOI also stressed that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signed last year by President Joe Biden "prohibits the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) from issuing a lease for offshore wind development unless the agency has offered at least 60 million acres for oil and gas leasing on the OCS in the previous year."
"BOEM continues to treat the Gulf as a region where community health and well-being can be sacrificed to allow continued oil and gas production."
That part of the IRA is one of the key reasons it has been criticized by climate campaigners, who continue to warn that the landmark package is far from enough to meet the U.S. goal of halving planet-heating emissions by the end of this decade.
The DOI's plan outraged the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) for not being friendly enough to the fossil fuel industry while advocates for the planet warned that it's not bold enough given the worsening climate emergency.
"Offshore oil and gas drilling is not only dirty and dangerous, but it also supercharges the existing climate crisis," Beth Lowell, Oceana's vice president for the United States, declared in a Friday statement about the finalized program. She pointed out that the process actually began under former President Donald Trump, who proposed 47 leasing sales.
"This five-year plan started with President Trump proposing to open nearly all U.S. waters to offshore oil drilling and ends with President Biden's final plan that is the smallest to date," she said. "The footprint of offshore drilling was not expanded, but the dangerous cycle of drilling and spilling must end."
After the Biden administration released its proposal in September, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Irene Gutierrez wrote the following month that "BOEM continues to treat the Gulf as a region where community health and well-being can be sacrificed to allow continued oil and gas production."
"BOEM also fails to account for the severe risks from additional oil and gas leasing to the Gulf ecosystem and species like the critically endangered Rice's whale," Gutierrez charged. "BOEM's analysis also treats catastrophic oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon disaster as events that are speculative and unlikely to repeat again, and the program excludes such spills from its analysis."
"In our comments to the proposed program and in other advocacy, we urged BOEM to issue a program with no new lease sales. The agency has ample authority to do so," she noted. "Further, declining fossil fuel demand and existing energy reserves mean that no new offshore leasing is needed for at least the next 30 years to meet national energy needs. BOEM could have issued a zero-lease sale plan, but declined to do so, despite calls from a wide range of community and environmental groups for no new leasing in the Gulf."
The DOI plan comes near the end of what experts have said will be the hottest year on record. It also comes on the heels of United Nations climate talks that scientists called "a tragedy for the planet," given that the final deal out of COP28 called for "transitioning away from fossil fuels," but did not endorse the "phaseout" demanded by civil society and most participating countries.
Biden—who is seeking reelection next year and may face off against Trump—has previously come under fire from frontline communities and climate organizations for skipping that U.N. summit, supporting the Willow oil project and Mountain Valley Pipeline, enabling the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports, and refusing to declare a national climate emergency.
On Thursday, the Biden administration released new proposed guidance on clean energy tax credits from the IRA.
"President Biden must do so much more if he wants to be taken seriously by young voters," Michele Weindling, political director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said in response to the guidance. "He is overseeing an explosion in oil and gas production that has resulted in the U.S. producing more fossil fuels than ever before."
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