And, if the administration's latest budget request is any indication, the White House actually plans to eliminate all funding for the program.
At the urging of Department of Government Efficiency staffers, the contract for the prime contractor, the Acacia Center for Justice, was canceled in April 2025. In court filings responding to litigation brought by Acacia subcontractors over the administration's actions against the Legal Orientation Program, DOJ officials said the government would run the program in-house.
The program provided in-person legal orientations at 35 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and reached 100 facilities via over-the-phone assistance.
In a May 2025 court filing, Sirce Owen, the then-acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, said that the new federalized program will involve immigration judges informing individuals of their rights as well as "hard copy and online legal tools such as self-help legal materials and EOIR's Immigration Court Online Resource (ICOR), a centralized repository for information and resources about immigration proceedings."
But according to Steve Lang, who spent 25 years at EOIR and was instrumental in starting the Legal Orientation Program in the early 2000s, federalization is "subterfuge for 'we just want to kill it.'"
He told Law360 in an interview last month that the program's design was not an obstacle to the Trump administration's stated goal of removing more people who are in the U.S. illegally.
"Our job was not to get more people released, or more people deported, it [was] to help the system work better," adding the Legal Orientation Program was a cost-efficient and effective program.
Nevertheless, Lang said two hours after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he was reassigned to a sanctuary cities working group where he didn't have much direction or support. He ultimately retired from DOJ that summer.
Sara Van Hofwegen, managing director for programs at Acacia, told Law360 last month the main benefit of the Legal Orientation Program is having information provided in a "neutral setting" that will "help people really understand their process, so that they can make their own decisions."
However, "it's hard to see what the government has actually been doing to make this an effective resource like they said they would," she said.
According to Van Hofwegen, the ICOR website is not user-friendly and a lot of the information provided online is out of date. Additionally, Acacia believes it's a conflict-of-interest for the immigration judges to be advising petitioners, especially as the Trump administration has been asserting more control over those courts.
Similarly, Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, told Law360 "there is no indication" the government has taken any steps to federalize the program. In its previous form, the Legal Orientation Program was "incredibly successful for a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things."
From the get-go the plaintiffs in the court case were skeptical of the administration's intentions to run the Legal Orientation Program.
"This 'replacement' is termination by another name," they said in a May 2025 filing. They also said the government didn't show any evidence they were considering federalizing the program until April 2025.
In July 2025, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss of the District of Columbia threw out the nonprofit's lawsuit and said they lacked the standing to challenge the federalized version of the Legal Orientation Program. The case is now on appeal and a decision is pending.
The DOJ did not respond for comment. However, it designated its future intentions for the program in its budget request for fiscal 2027 by requesting that Congress remove the statutory language that requires spending $27.5 million on the Legal Orientation Program.
"Removing the required [the Legal Orientation Program] funding levels allows EOIR to better manage its limited resources and increase capacity to help address the backlog," the proposed language states.
Besides the Legal Orientation Program, the Amica Center's lawsuit also challenges the administration's funding cut to DOJ's Immigration Court Helpdesk, the Family Group Legal Orientation Program and the Counsel for Children Initiative
Separately, EOIR's Recognition and Accreditation Program, which authorizes nonlawyers to assist low-income and indigent persons in immigration proceedings has been drained of staff. Over 300 of the groups that participate in this program sent a letter to DOJ leadership recently urging them to fully restore the program.
"We're seeing this curtailing of information and legal access for people facing deportation from the United States at the same time that we're seeing the government ramp up deportations, try to remove people more quickly, change processes to make them even more complicated and hard to understand," said Van Hofwegen. "It really feels like this coordinated process to try to deport as many people as possible without any projections or without a fair chance."
--Editing by Jay Jackson Jr.
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