Marcella Burke poses for a portrait in the Burke Law Group office in Houston. She is founder and chairman of a small firm that was at the center of a dustup related to a purported $150 million contract to represent children in immigration proceedings. (Daniel Ortiz Photography / Courtesy Burke Law Group)
"I was blindsided by the Federal Register notice," Burke said. "It seemed premature, and it was confusing."
Burke, who held high-level legal roles in the first Trump administration, launched the firm in 2023 and said she has worked to position it as an elite provider of services for corporate clients, mostly energy companies.
Burke says the firm's attorneys have top-level legal skills, and some have significant immigration law experience, but she acknowledges it's not an immigration law firm. That relative lack of immigration expertise and the firm's small size led to an outraged response from critics who said the firm was unqualified for the purported $150 million immigration-related contract.
Within days, the federal government walked back its announcement, saying it hadn't actually awarded the money, and Burke Law Group withdrew from the project.
Burke said she wanted to help because the government reached out and because she learned of children who lost legal counsel and were forced to face the immigration court system alone. "There was a five-year-old representing himself pro se," she said.
She said she had done some pro bono immigration work at a prior law firm, she's the mother of five boys, and she said the situation moved her.
"I was very compelled by the plight of these vulnerable children, some extremely young. It was very heartbreaking, and I wanted to see if there was something I could do to help the kids," Burke said.
Still, the fallout continues: Burke Law Group faces investigative inquiries from members of Congress.
Burke, 44, is an energy attorney who in the first Trump administration served as deputy general counsel at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
She was subsequently deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources at the U.S. Department of the Interior, and also served as a legal adviser on energy issues.
Burke has also worked at BigLaw firms including Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, King & Spalding LLP and Eversheds Sutherland.
She said her talks with the government about representing immigrant children began in early July. A firm representative said she had not been seeking immigration work.
"I got a phone call, a couple calls in tandem," Burke said.
"One was from another law firm in Washington, D.C., and one was from someone at [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which handles some issues involving immigrant children]. And the HHS had been looking for law firms in Houston or had Houston offices to be able to take these cases and coordinate taking these cases, and a D.C. firm referred me, and so they called me to give me a heads-up that I might get a call."
Through a representative, Burke declined to name the law firm that referred her to HHS.
She said the government needed someone to build a network of pro bono lawyers in Houston.
She said in her first call, there was no discussion about the number of cases. "So my initial call, it was high level. 'Can you help? Can you put together a network?'"
She said the government was expected to pay roughly $114 per hour for the most experienced lawyers working on the cases. That's much less than the $950 to $1,450 an hour Burke said the firm usually earns representing its commercial clients.
As discussions continued, plans became clearer: Burke Law Group would take responsibility for representing about 700 immigrant children in the Houston area, she said.
In turn, Burke Law Group would distribute most of those 700 cases among a network of pro bono lawyers at other elite Houston firms.
She said the firm never settled on any dollar amount for total compensation.
"There'd never been a dollar amount," she said. "The furthest we got was they had sent me some paperwork for filings that I would fill out for a potential budget, and we began working up numbers internally to reverse engineer how much time it would take between attorneys and other resources to represent 700 kids in a year."
Burke poses for a portrait in the Burke Law Group office in Houston with three of her sons under the table. She has five sons in all. Though most of her legal work has focused on defense of oil and gas companies, she said she'd done some pro bono immigration work at a prior law firm, and she said she felt moved by reports of children who were appearing in deportation proceedings without lawyers. (Daniel Ortiz Photography / Courtesy Burke Law Group)
Announcement of the purported $150 million award prompted coverage in numerous major news outlets, and Burke initially declined to comment. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, she said that she immediately tried to get the federal government to clarify the statement in the Federal Register.
"I called HHS, and they explained that all it meant was that I was eligible for such a large grant, not that I had applied [for] or received one," she said. "And we discussed that that [$150 million] number was something we had never talked about, and would there be an opportunity to clarify on the record, because I think there could be a lot of scrutiny and possible public confusion."
Burke had talked with attorneys at other firms about participating in the representation of the children.
As critics raised questions about the size of the contract and Burke Law Group's abilities to take on the job, the other law firms that would have been involved in the pro bono project pulled out, Burke said.
"Nobody wanted to have anything to do with this, and I no longer had a network of elite lawyers from prestigious law firms across the country and based in Houston willing to help," she said.
The government walked back the announcement, and on Aug. 11, Burke Law Group announced in a post on X that it had only been considering applying for the work.
"We have decided not to apply for a grant or a contract and we withdrew from consideration," the statement said.
In response to a request for comment on Burke's account of the contracting dustup, HHS said only that it had published the Federal Register notice "to share … intent to possibly enter into a cooperative agreement with Burke Law Group PLLC, a private law firm with a strong geographic presence in Texas. Burke Law Group declined to apply and withdrew any further consideration."
The Federal Register announcement of the immigration contract this month led to threats, Burke said.
"I had a number of law professors rallying people to challenge my bar license and those of everybody at my law firm. We had people at the law firm being threatened online fairly publicly, and it just became an unfortunate situation," she said.
Burke said she didn't wish to discuss the threats in detail, out of concern that doing so would amplify the message.
"I will say we took them very seriously," she said, adding that the firm had filed reports with government agencies.
Burke said her firm is still facing investigative inquiries from three different members of Congress.
In an Aug. 10 letter, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., requested records and information about the selection of Burke Law Group, raising concerns about what he called the firm's "apparent utter lack of qualifications for this work, logistical questions, potential conflicts of interest, and the price tag."
Then in an Aug. 19 letter, filed after Burke Law Group announced it no longer was seeking a contract, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., raised questions about the law firm's account of what happened and demanded answers.
Legal Battle for Funding
The dispute over Burke Law Group's potential work for the government came amid a legal battle over funding for the Acacia Center for Justice, which had previously contracted with the government to provide lawyers to represent unaccompanied children in immigration proceedings.
The Trump administration sought to cut off funding to the Acacia Center for Justice in early 2025, triggering a complex and ongoing legal fight.
In April 2025, a California federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that blocked the government from cutting off the funds. As the litigation continues, however, Acacia's contract expired on July 31.
A nonprofit called the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or USCRI, is now scheduled to provide services through Dec. 31. The government also signed a contract with another group, Our Rescue, but the contract is on hold, pending a bid challenge filed at the U.S. Government Accountability Office by the Acacia Center for Justice.
Fighter for Conservative Causes
Even before the criticism the firm received over its purported contract with the government, Burke's firm had already faced criticism in some circles for its work championing high-profile cases of interest to conservatives.
Chief among them are representing medical workers who accused Texas Children's Hospital in Houston of providing unauthorized gender-affirming care to young people.
Burke's representation of a nurse in a whistleblower complaint led to a multimillion-dollar settlement with the hospital this year.
Burke says she sees such treatment of transgender youth as morally wrong, calling it a "fundamental issue of young people being sterilized for life with lack of informed consent based on studies that had been debunked."
She launched her firm in 2023 after several years in BigLaw where she said she experienced cultural clashes over issues like the firms' support for abortion rights — Burke describes herself as a devout Catholic and supports restrictions on abortions.
She also said her staunch defense of oil and gas companies also caused friction at big firms.
"Some of the clients that I was doing a lot of work for were interested in thinking of ways that they could challenge some of the perceived incorrect assumptions on climate change … but then when it went up to, say, an executive committee, the firm made a decision: We don't want to take cases challenging climate change."
Asked about her hope for what happens next, she said she remains concerned about the immigrant children.
"There's still a fundamental injustice that needs to be addressed, which is these children need good lawyers to represent them," she said.
--Additional reporting by Britain Eakin, Madeline Lyskawa, Tom Lotshaw, Hannah Albarazi and Spencer Brewer. Editing by Nicole Bleier.
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