She was beginning her spring semester as a second-year law student and paralegal when she received the news: The immigration clinic where she volunteered would have to stop all work, a demand directly from the Trump administration.
The White House issued a stop-work order on Feb. 18, 2025, cutting off aid to federally funded unaccompanied children programs (UCPs) across the U.S. The programs, which provide legal representation to migrant youth who cross the border alone or do not have family in the U.S., were one of the current Trump administration’s first targets.
“I was told to just go home and literally stop working,” recalled the law student Marsha, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retribution.
Days later, on Feb. 23, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) distributed a memo with a new task for its agents: search for unaccompanied children nationwide and target them for deportation.
This included children such as those Marsha worked with. At the clinic, she assisted them with requesting and receiving court appointments, gaining work authorization, and preparing asylum cases. Some were as old as 18. Others were as young as 3.
As a result of the funding cuts, according to Marsha, the clinic was forced to deny legal representation to children on a waitlist for more than a year and stop providing legal aid to those it was actively working with.
“It’s completely antithetical to this administration’s stance that everyone should be here legally when you’re gutting the legal infrastructure for that process,” Marsha said.
However, this appeared to be the Trump administration’s strategy: tear down previously established resources as a way to fuel mass deportations, which are then carried out by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Agents ripped families apart, caused loved ones to disappear, and rounded up those it claimed were present in the country “illegally” — including U.S. citizens and Native Americans.
In her law school classes, Marsha studied what she was watching in real time: immigrants being treated as national security threats. Then in April 2025, she was enraged to learn that the college she attended, St. John’s University in Queens, New York, signed an agreement with CBP, one of the agencies responsible for immigration enforcement.
“These are the same people [the clinic was] taking to court to convince them that this child who crossed the border alone deserves to stay here, does not deserve to go back to a war-torn country — a country that was destabilized by American policy,” she said.
Prism filed a public records request on Oct. 2, 2025 to obtain a copy of the agreement between St. John’s and CBP. The agency did not provide the records by publication time, in violation of the Freedom of Information Act.
When the agreement was announced by St. John’s, university leaders said the goal of the collaboration was to create the “Institute for Border Security and Intelligence Studies,” which the university claimed would help CBP “identify intelligence challenges.” The agreement also planned to allow CBP to access the university’s Homeland Security Simulation Lab,