In the best tradition of New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Attorney General Tish James are teaming up to help unaccompanied minors facing deportation proceedings without attorneys, a cruel and inhumane situation exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks against immigrants.

There will be $7.25 million in public funds for legal services for a group of providers organized by the Hispanic Federation to provide representation to these children.

Because immigration court is civil, people don’t automatically get appointed government lawyers in the same way as in criminal court, a reality that extends to children. Yet federal law has long held that the government should take active steps toward providing some level of representation to minors, something administrations Democratic and Republican have long done.

No surprise that Trump has blown up the precedent, withdrawing funds already appropriated for this purpose and trying instead to bestow a huge contract first on a Trump-affiliated law firm with no relevant experience and then a discredited nonprofit that also does not have relevant experience. Caught in the crossfire are innocent kids trying simply to stay in safety.

It’s a sad state of affairs when New York has to step in to do something as basic as provide some basic due process rights for children, who can and do find themselves alone in court, facing both a trained ICE prosecutor and an immigration “judge” who is also a Trump Department of Justice employee.

Unsurprisingly, the success rates for children who have to face removal proceedings unrepresented are abysmal, and not because they necessarily have weak cases (though you’d be hard-pressed to find any good rationale for deporting a child alone), but because who could expect these kids to be able to navigate the system.

Think back to when you were 7 or 8-years-old, during any particularly scary or stressful moment in your life. Now imagine that, in the midst of that, someone had pulled you aside and demanded that you file your family’s tax return for the year; you had to make sure to get everything, all receipts and expenditures and deductions, and if you got it wrong, the consequences were dire and irreversible.

Do you think you could do it? Of course you couldn’t. To expect kids to navigate this system by themselves, or with some hapless Trump flunkie as their representative, is beyond irresponsible and veers into cruel. We commend New York for stepping in, capping a push in which the state also passed legislation that prohibits cooperation and detention agreements between state agencies and ICE and makes it easier for New Yorkers to sue over constitutional violations.

There remain some questions about what the state can or will do about federal overreach that no one seems to want to answer, namely around the potential use of state authority and law enforcement to constrain law-breaking by ICE agents and the other federal personnel delegated to assist them. Minnesota authorities began criminal inquiries after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, having to fight the federal government to secure the relevant evidence.

Would New York authorities be willing to use their own police powers to, say, prevent federal agents from violating protesters’ constitutional rights or investigate crimes allegedly committed by federal agents? We hope that answer is yes, and if it is, that our leaders make that crystal clear to both New Yorkers and to Washington.

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