Trump Paid $244M to a Group with No Lawyers, Run by ICE, to Defend Kids in Deportation Court

The Trump administration just handed up to two hundred forty four million dollars to a right wing group whose founder was accused of sex trafficking, and put them in charge of defending immigrant children in deportation court.Sound of Freedom was the 2023 propaganda film about a guy who quits Homeland Security to run sting operations against child sex traffickers overseas. Trump hosted a screening at his own golf club and sat front row next to the man the movie is about, Tim Ballard. Two months later Ballard resigned after multiple women who worked with him accused him of sexual abuse and trafficking.The group that movie is about is called Our Rescue. They are not a law firm. NPR could not confirm they employ a single immigration attorney. What their website advertises is legal support to help prosecute offenders. Prosecute. They run sting operations to help cops build cases, and now they’re responsible for defending three year olds from the government.Running the place now is Derek Benner, who ran Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE, under the first Trump administration. So the kids fighting ICE in court have lawyers, allegedly, run by a former ICE boss.The award notice went up on the government’s public contracting site at 9:04 on a Friday night, the hour you pick when you want a thing to exist legally and never get read.Scott Dworkin, who writes a daily newsletter called The Dworkin Report, opened the actual award record. Nobody else bothered. Offers received, one. Competitive bidding, none. It is not a fixed price contract, so there is no ceiling on what they can bill you, and the government waived the requirement that they justify their rates. What the actual feck? A blank check to a group with no legal practice, and nobody has to check the math.The excuse for skipping the bidding was urgency, which Health and Human Services manufactured themselves. They let the contract lapse with Acacia, which had done this work for almost twenty years, stopped paying them for work already delivered, and watched nearly a hundred legal offices fall apart. A judge had to order that money released. Then they pointed at the hole they dug and called it an emergency.Twenty four thousand children are in this system and federal law says every one of them gets a lawyer. The Guardian watched kids as young as three face deportation hearings on a video screen in New York this summer with nobody to represent them. A three year old cannot spell deportation, but apparently he’s expected to argue it anyway.Every piece of this gets sold as protecting children from traffickers. So here is their actual trafficking enforcement. Reuters went through the federal court records this week and found the Justice Department has charged fewer sex traffickers than any year since 2010. Seventy three through June. One reason is that agents and prosecutors who worked trafficking cases got reassigned to immigration enforcement.So the Justice Department isn’t catching traffickers. Health and Human Services isn’t paying the lawyers who defend the kids. But somebody found up to two hundred forty four million dollars, uncapped, for people who have never done this before.The tagline of that movie, the line theaters cheered for, was God’s children are not for sale. Turns out they go for two hundred forty four million, no receipts required.Sources:https://prospect.org/2026/08/11/our-rescue-disgraced-anti-sex-trafficking-ngo-migrant-kids/https://www.npr.org/2026/08/12/nx-s1-5929456/migrant-children-our-rescuehttps://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/07/31/unaccompanied-children-migrants-without-lawyers-trump/https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-promised-sex-trafficking-crackdown-his-justice-department-hasnt-delivered-2026-08-13/ Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe