US appeals judge's order to fund legal aid for 26,000 migrant minors

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and two other government departments appealed and moved Monday to dissolve an Oakland federal judge's April 1 temporary restraining order on that required the Trump administration to restore funding of legal services to 26,000 unaccompanied minors y seeking asylum at the border.

Numerous procedural motions loom over the lawsuit, filed last month by 11 nonprofit legal services handling asylum cases, that accuses the government of illegally terminating a $5 billion program that has been in place since 2007 and leaving 26,000 minors without legal counsel. Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto et al. v. United States Department of Health and Human Services et al., 3:25-cv-02847 (N.D.Cal. filed March 26, 2025).

Monday's appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and separate motion to dissolve the TRO, filed in Oakland federal court, center on the government's claim that an April 4 U.S. Supreme Court decision "materially changed" the law controlling government contracts in their favor and thus, the grounds for U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin's decision to grant the TRO are no longer valid.

The government also wants the judge, a recent appointee of President Joe Biden, removed from the case because of her past employment as a managing attorney for one of the plaintiffs, Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, and previous comments she allegedly made about President Donald Trump.

The plaintiffs' legal team, comprised of in-house attorneys from the nonprofits, fired back in a new brief Monday urging Martinez-Olguin to issue a preliminary injunction and deny the defendants' attempt to avoid restoring the contracts because the government's reliance on the Supreme Court's decision in Department of Education v. California is "misplaced."

The media relations offices for the following defendants declined to comment on Monday: U.S Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Yaakov M. Roth, acting assistant U.S. Attorney General and lead attorney for the defense, argued in Monday's appellate brief the Supreme Court's latest interpretation of the Administrative Procedure Act leaves the trial court without jurisdiction to enforce the order.

"Defendants moved to dissolve the temporary restraining order based on the intervening Supreme Court decision in Department of Education v. California (holding that 'the government is likely to succeed in showing the District Court lacked jurisdiction to order the payment of money under the APA' and requiring such cases to be transferred to the Court of Federal Claims)," the brief stated.

The appeal was spurred by Martinez-Olguin's April 10 order to extend the TRO from 14 to 28 days in light of a motion for recusal the government filed the day before.

The plaintiffs' attorneys fired back, arguing in Monday's brief that the defendants' arguments are "an effort to manufacture a jurisdictional defect" that does not exist.

The plaintiffs' legal team is led by: Alvaro M. Huerta of Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles; Karen C. Tumlin of Justice Action Center in Los Angeles, and Samantha Hsieh of AMICA Center for Immigrant Rights in Washington D.C.

The DOJ attorneys claimed in a status report filed last week that the defendants took "immediate steps to develop a compliance plan" that restored the terminated portions of the contracts that provided the government would pay for "direct legal representation, recruitment of pro bono attorneys, and expansion of direct representation that had been eliminated on March 21, 2025."

The nonprofit plaintiffs are: Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto; Social Justice Collaborative in Berkeley; AMICA Center for Immigrant Rights in Washington D.C.; Estrella Del Paso in El Paso, Texas; Florence immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Florence, Arizona; Galveston-Houston Representation Project in Houston; Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles; National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago; Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle; Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Westminster, Colorado; and Vermont Asylum Assistant Project in Burlington, Vermont.