The Department of Justice (DOJ) can temporarily stop funding programs that provide legal orientation for illegal immigrants, including those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while a lawsuit brought by the groups providing the service plays out in court, a federal judge ruled on April 15.
The ruling by District Judge Randolph Moss impacts multiple programs, including the Legal Orientation Program, the Immigration Court Helpdesk, the Family Group Legal Orientation Program, and the Counsel for Children Initiative.
Congress allocates $29 million a year for the four programs that collectively provide information to unrepresented illegal immigrants about their rights and obligations throughout removal proceedings.
Moss’s ruling means that a coalition of nonprofit groups that offer the programs will now temporarily lose their federal funding on April 16.
That order directed the attorney general and secretary of homeland security to conduct an audit of all contracts, grants, and other agreements providing federal funding to non-governmental organizations that support or provide services to “removable or illegal aliens,” as part of Trump’s efforts to cut down on waste and fraud within the government.
Shortly after the order was signed, the DOJ issued a “stop work order” for the programs to allow for an audit while simultaneously pausing funding.
In their lawsuit, the coalition of nonprofits argued that the programs impacted by the pause in funding were needed to help boost immigration court efficiency, cut costs in immigration administrative adjudications, and “provide safeguards for unrepresented noncitizens in an overburdened immigration system.”
‘Devastating and Irreparable Effects’
Programs like the Immigration Court Helpdesk and others are “the only source of expert information about the immigration legal system many individuals ever receive,” and scrapping them at a time when detentions and deportations are “increasing exponentially” under the Trump administration’s efforts to tackle the illegal immigration crisis would have “devastating and irreparable effects” to individuals in custody, they said.The lawsuit further argued that Trump’s order violated the Administrative Procedure Act because Congress had already appropriated and allocated funds to some of the programs in a bill signed into law under the Biden administration in 2024.
In addition, the order violated the organization’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech to disseminate information advising illegal immigrants about their legal rights at ICE detention centers, the lawsuit argued.
The DOJ rescinded the stop-work order shortly after the lawsuit was filed and ordered that funding to the programs be restored, without providing details regarding its decision.
During the April 15 hearing, Justice Department attorney Zachary Sherwood told Moss that the case was essentially a contract dispute, and shouldn’t be handled in U.S. District Court but instead moved to the Court of Federal Claims, which handles most contract-related claims against the federal government.
Moss told attorneys on both sides that he could not find an immediate justification to order the Justice Department to continue funding the programs for now.
The judge requested more information from both parties before issuing a final decision in the case next month, including any records showing how the DOJ came to its decision to end the contracts, and any plans for spending the earmarked money in the future, as well as information regarding any issues the groups experience when they attempt to reach out to detained noncitizens in the coming weeks.
The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Justice for comment.
