Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) highlighted her efforts on Wednesday to aid migrant children who crossed the U.S. border without parents, announcing her administration is spending over $7 million to provide them with legal representation.
The governor said $7.25 million will be allocated to provide legal representation for around 1,400 children in New York undergoing deportation proceedings in court, during a press conference alongside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and state Attorney General Letitia James. The funding will be directed to legal service providers led by the Hispanic Federation, according to Hochul’s office.
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“Damn right I did,” Hochul wrote on X, in response to a media report on the spending.
“When we lose sight of our shared responsibility to protect God’s children here on Earth as human beings, as parents, then we lose part of who we are,” she added during the press briefing.
The children in New York are a fraction of over 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children whom Republicans believe were encountered by border officials during the Biden administration.
There have been serious concerns that there were significant failures by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency tasked with overseeing those children, to ensure they were not released from the government to human traffickers or into other troubling conditions. The ORR appeared to have lost track of around 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children during the Biden administration, sparking concerns that they could have been sex trafficked, used for labor, or left in other dangerous situations.
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New York’s move to pay legal fees for unaccompanied migrant children comes after the Trump administration allowed a $356 million annual contract with a network of around 100 legal aid providers for such children to expire in July. While the government awarded a new $150 million contract to a Texas law firm, the move sparked concerns from critics who worried the sole provider lacked the capability and experience to represent unaccompanied migrant children and said that the new contract only applies to children held in government-run shelters.
“The refusal to renew this contract with providers who specialize in this work is nothing less than a deportation order for children as young as 5 years old,” Mamdani said Wednesday. “That is a betrayal of some of the most vulnerable people in our city and an insult … to the very ideals upon which our nation has been built today.”
