Federal Agents Showed Up at a Children's Legal Aid Office. They Left Empty-Handed.
The Trump administration sent HSI and HHS investigators to three D.C.-area nonprofits representing unaccompanied immigrant kids — without a warrant. The organizations told them no.
Without a warrant. Without a subpoena. Without any legal authority cited at the door.
That’s how federal agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations and the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General showed up at the Washington offices of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights — and two other nonprofits representing unaccompanied immigrant children — during a 48-hour sweep on or around June 11–12, 2026.
They wanted client files. They wanted financial records. They wanted information about children.
They didn’t get any of it.
What Happened at the Door
Amica, Ayuda, and Kids in Need of Defense — three D.C.-area legal aid organizations funded by Congress to represent unaccompanied minors — confirmed in a joint statement that federal agents conducted unannounced site visits at each of their offices, targeting documents and financial records tied to a federally funded children’s legal representation program.
The agents presented no warrant. They cited no legal authority. All three organizations refused them access. All three organizations said the agents left empty-handed.
Amica executive director Michael Lukens did not mince words. He called it “a blatant abuse of power to try to intimidate child advocates who have dedicated their lives to advocating for unaccompanied immigrant children.”
The program being investigated — which funds legal representation for unaccompanied minors — was created by Congress, has operated for more than 15 years, and has held bipartisan support through multiple administrations.
This Is Not a One-Off
The June visits did not arrive without context. They are the latest chapter in what civil rights groups and immigration attorneys say is a coordinated federal campaign to make legal work on behalf of immigrants harder, riskier, and more costly.
Earlier in the Trump administration, the Justice Department abruptly ordered a stop-work halt to federally funded legal orientation and representation programs — including those run by Amica — shuttering services that help detained immigrants navigate immigration court. When Amica staff showed up at a Virginia detention facility to continue working on their own dime, officials escorted them out roughly an hour after they arrived.
Amica and eight peer organizations sued. Within 11 days, DOJ restored funding. But the message had been sent: legal access in detention was something the government could cut off at will.
The June office raids extend that logic into new territory — from blocking legal services inside detention centers to showing up, unannounced, at the nonprofits providing them.
A Pattern Documented Across the Country
The Amica visits are not isolated. A national picture is forming:
In Minnesota, a federal lawsuit alleges DHS and ICE deliberately blocked attorneys from meeting with detained clients at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building — denying confidential attorney-client meetings, surveilling communications, and transferring detainees out of state before lawyers could reach them. According to the complaint filed by Democracy Forward, attorneys were misled, denied entry, and in some cases threatened by federal security personnel.
In Oregon, Innovation Law Lab filed a federal complaint on behalf of a farmworker union and a legal clinic documenting at least 20 incidents where detainees were denied attorney access or secretly transferred mid-visit. In one case, an attorney waiting in a federal field office lobby was blocked from seeing her client while ICE moved him out a back door and shipped him to a facility in Washington state.
In Detroit, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee described the airport detention of civil rights and immigration attorney Amir Makled, who was held for approximately 90 minutes on return from a trip, questioned about his clients, and pressured to let agents inspect a phone containing privileged information. ADC called it part of an “increasing pattern of harassment and intimidation” of attorneys working high-profile immigration cases.
The Legal Defense Fund connected these dots explicitly, framing the Amica office visit alongside a DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center and a congressional investigation into the Democracy Defenders Fund as three prongs of the same campaign — one designed not just to investigate nonprofits, but to make civil rights and immigrant advocacy organizations flinch.
What Congress Needs to Answer
The federal subcontractors targeted at Amica, Ayuda, and KIND are implementing a program Congress created and funded. There is no public record — no warrant, no OIG report, no agency statement — explaining what specific misconduct HSI or HHS OIG believed they were investigating.
That gap is a story in itself.
The relevant appropriators and authorizers on Capitol Hill have not said publicly whether they were briefed on, or authorized, this investigative posture toward their own grantees. Whether they view warrantless raids on congressionally funded legal services providers as consistent with legislative intent is a question that deserves a direct, on-the-record answer.
KIND president Wendy Young said the operation was “consistent with ongoing administration efforts targeting nonprofit organizations operating in the immigration space and undermining legal services for unaccompanied children seeking safety in the United States.”
The agents showed up without a warrant. The organizations said no. And the children those organizations represent are still waiting for someone in power to say that was wrong.
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