WHEN G.J.C.P., as she is known in court documents, was 13, gang members in her native El Salvador began tormenting her. The men offered her drugs, nagged her to get involved with them romantically and urged her to join their gang. G.J.C.P. refused, though the men had previously murdered a friend of hers for a similar offence. Fearful for her life and hoping to begin anew, she fled to America. Before she could get far, she was scooped up by border patrol agents in Hidalgo, Texas. Like many undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children, G.J.C.P. has no lawyer to represent her in her deportation proceedings. By law, migrants facing removal are assured the right to an attorney. They do not, however, have the right to a free one—only defendants in criminal cases do. If they can afford the $2,000-$10,000 it costs to process most deportation cases, unaccompanied migrant children are welcome to appear in court with a lawyer. If not, they are expected to seek help from non-profit organisations, which are stretched, or to represent themselves against government prosecutors. In the 91,104 deportation cases involving unaccompanied migrant children between 2004 and 2014, 46% of the plaintiffs have not had legal representation. Ninety percent of those who represented themselves were deported, while only 39% of children with lawyers were.

The number of children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador crossing the border with Mexico began to rise steeply in 2012, after people-smugglers discovered that their odds of success were better with minors, who cannot so easily be turned back by border guards, than with adults and changed their business model accordingly. The federal government responded by speeding up the deportation of child migrants in July 2014. This message seems to have reached Central America: in 2015 the number of unaccompanied children picked up by border patrol dropped back down to 40,000. For those already in the country, the government increased funding for child migrants in court, but not by enough to assure they all get lawyers. Adolescents over 16 were excluded from the initiative entirely.

A few days after the federal government changed tack, a team of civil-liberties groups, advocacy organisations and private law firms launched a nationwide class-action lawsuit against the attorney-general’s office for failing to provide migrant children with representation in deportation proceedings. Not doing so, they argued, violates immigration laws and the 5th Amendment right to due process. On March 24th, after nearly two years of back and forth, a judge will rule on whether to certify the plaintiffs’ proposed class: all children under 18 involved in immigration proceedings after July 2014, who do not have attorneys and are unable to afford one. Should the judge reject the certification, the case will press forward to a trial in September with just a handful of plaintiffs.

Both Eric Holder, the former attorney-general, and Loretta Lynch, the present one, have expressed dismay at the current state of affairs. One immigration judge has said he had “taught immigration law literally to three- and four-year olds.” Eleni Wolfe-Roubatis of the Centro Legal de La Raza, a non-profit group in Oakland, California, says that she has seen a child as young as 18-months old in proceedings on their own. When Ms Wolfe-Roubatis later took on the 18-month-old girl as a client, she held the infant in her arms as she made her pleadings. Kathryn Coiner-Collier, who works with unaccompanied migrant children in North Carolina, describes how lawyerless four- and five-year-olds fidget and play around in their hearings.

Unaccompanied child migrants often struggle even to make it to court to defend themselves. Atenas Burrola, another immigration lawyer in North Carolina who serves low-income clients, explains that undocumented people cannot get driving licences in many states, and anyway lots of the children in deportation proceedings aren’t old enough to drive. She recalls one 15-year-old boy who had to shell out $300 each way for a taxi from his home in South Carolina to immigration court in North Carolina. Unrepresented children have missed more than 70% of their court appearances since 2005, and are often ordered to be deported in absentia. This was the case for G.J.C.P. When her grandmother called to check the status of her case, she learned a judge had already ordered her granddaughter to be removed.