Sixty-three congressional Democrats sent a letter Monday to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, pressing the agencies over new federal contracts for legal representation of migrant children.
The dispute centers on a no-bid award, a withdrawn intent notice, a stayed contract, and a fight over who is qualified to counsel unaccompanied minors in immigration cases. Lawmakers call the selected firms unfit. HHS defends its anti-trafficking pick. An HHS official said the largest award is on hold after a White House funding move.
ABC News reported that the letter seeks information on the contract path and on whether the agencies plan further awards tied to migrant children. Rep. Joaquin Castro and Rep. Jasmine Crockett were among the signers.
The Democrats told Kennedy and the ORR director they are “gravely concerned that ORR would entrust a vulnerable population with firms so plainly unqualified for the task.”
They grounded the demand in statute. The letter states that under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, ORR must provide confidential and qualified legal consultation to unaccompanied children.
That claim frames the political fight as a compliance question, not only a spending fight. It also tracks a broader pattern of lawmakers leaning on Kennedy’s department, including when congressional lawmakers pressed RFK Jr. on hospice and home health oversight.
The letter’s sharpest charge lands on capacity. Lawmakers wrote that Our Rescue does not list legal services among its primary functions and is unlikely to have the infrastructure and legal expertise to represent thousands of children nationwide.
"If ORR proceeds with this contract, ORR will be gambling with the legal fate of thousands of children on an organization that has not clearly demonstrated it can do this work,"
They also wrote that these children present case complexities that require highly specialized expertise.
Last month, HHS awarded a no-bid $158 million contract to Our Rescue, a Utah-based group previously known as Operation Underground Railroad, to provide legal services to migrant children.
Our Rescue was founded by activist Tim Ballard, who resigned in 2023 amid allegations of misconduct. Ballard denied the allegations in a statement posted through one of his organizations. Derek Benner, a former Department of Homeland Security official from the first Trump administration, now runs the group.
HHS did not concede the Democrats’ fitness attack. A department spokesperson called Our Rescue “a premier organization focused on combatting human trafficking globally.”
The department’s fuller defense tied trafficking work to immigration counsel. HHS said the group understands the crime and the foreign populations preyed upon by criminal networks that profit from exploiting vulnerable people.
"As such, they are perfectly positioned to understand and recognize if or when an unaccompanied child has been victimized and will have the legal representation to pursue any immigration avenues available."
That is the core institutional clash: Democrats say the vendor lacks listed legal-service functions and scale. HHS says trafficking expertise is the point of the pick.
The money picture shifted after the award. An HHS official told ABC News the Our Rescue contract is currently stayed after the White House announced that $800 million in congressionally approved funding is being rescinded. Authorities have not publicly detailed in this account whether the stay ends the deal, pauses it, or resets the procurement path.
Kennedy’s HHS has also moved aggressively on payment integrity elsewhere, including when RFK Jr. accused Biden-era HHS of gutting fraud controls and froze more than $1 billion bound for California and Minnesota.
HHS also announced intent to award a $150 million contract to Burke Law Group, described as a small Texas firm founded by a former Trump appointee.
Burke Law Group withdrew from consideration after lawmakers and advocacy groups raised concerns that the firm lacked experience representing migrant children. Democrats told Kennedy the withdrawal “underscores our concerns with how your agency is handling these contracts and award process.”
No public results in the provided account identify the former appointee by name, and investigators and overseers outside this dispute would still need basic vendor-capacity records if a replacement award moves forward.
Rep. Joaquin Castro told ABC News the population at issue sits at the edge of the system.
"Unaccompanied minors are the most vulnerable population in the immigration system,"
Castro added that lawmakers claim a moral and statutory duty to provide quality legal representation. He said the Trump administration’s attempt to cut out longstanding providers equipped for these cases jeopardized children’s well-being. That is his accusation. HHS, for its part, has publicly defended the trafficking-focused rationale for Our Rescue rather than accepting the “unqualified” label.
The letter fight sits on top of an earlier contracting break. The government ended a contract with legal advocacy groups that had provided representation to migrant children, and the prior children’s legal-services arrangement expired.
Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said his organization used to receive funding through a government contract that was terminated. He told ABC News nonprofits are doing their best to keep the lights on and help as many unaccompanied children as possible.
Lukens went further on scale and court conditions. He said that since the Trump administration let the children’s legal-services contract expire with no plan in place for more than 20,000 kids, he has seen what he called an unprecedented attack on immigrant children.
"We are seeing children being bullied in court to take self-deportation and other children showing up without any counsel, even though the government is mandated to provide them with an attorney,"
He added that unaccompanied immigrant children need meaningful and expert advocacy through the court system, not political games. Those courtroom characterizations are Lukens’s claims. The account does not include independent court tallies confirming the volume of unrepresented appearances he describes.
ABC News also placed the letter against other administration actions already in the public record. In June, DHS agents visited offices of several Washington-area nonprofit organizations that provide legal services to unaccompanied migrant children.
Last year, ABC News reported the administration was directing immigration agents to track down unaccompanied migrant children in the United States. The letter package does not present those field actions as criminal findings against the nonprofits. It presents them as part of the wider operational backdrop Democrats are using to attack the contract reset.
Large public-health and benefits pipelines remain a recurring integrity battleground for conservatives watching federal dollars, from a California man drawing 30 years in a $269 million Medi-Cal fraud scheme to multi-defendant health-care cases brought by federal prosecutors.
The same enforcement lens shows up in indictment-stage cases as well, including when the DOJ indicted 19 people in an alleged $4 million Medicare and Medicaid fraud ring in Philadelphia. Contract vetting and statutory duty arguments land harder when taxpayers already distrust weak controls.
The Democrats asked Kennedy and ORR for information on the Our Rescue contract and on any additional awards planned in support of migrant children. Publicly confirmed answers on replacement counsel capacity are not set out in this account beyond the stayed $158 million deal and Burke’s withdrawal.
Absolute calendar dates for “Monday,” for “last month,” and for the White House rescission announcement are not fixed in the package. The ORR director is not named. The prior advocacy contractors are not named. Primary corporate filings proving or disproving Our Rescue’s listed functions are not reproduced beyond the lawmakers’ assertion and the HHS rebuttal.
Investigators and oversight staff will need to determine whether any successor vendor can actually field confidential, qualified consultation at national volume, how the stayed award interacts with the $800 million rescission, and what interim coverage exists while nonprofits say they are stretching thinner rosters.
Strip away the press-conference adjectives and the legal posture is straightforward. ORR faces a statutory consultation duty under the 2008 trafficking reauthorization framework cited by the letter writers. HHS tried to rebuild representation through a no-bid trafficking organization and a separate $150 million intent notice to a Texas firm. One firm walked. One contract is stayed. Democrats want paper on the process.
HHS says anti-trafficking experience is operationally relevant to spotting exploitation and then pursuing immigration avenues. Democrats say specialized immigration counsel is not interchangeable with trafficking activism and that the award process itself looks shaky after the Burke withdrawal.
For readers who care about borders, kids, and public money at the same time, the unresolved issue is competence under law: who gets paid, who walks into court, and whether the agency can show a clean, durable counsel plan after the prior contract expired.
Contract fights at HHS rarely stay narrow. They become tests of whether political pressure, vendor claims, and statutory text can survive contact with procurement reality.
