A 3-year-old is expected to be her own attorney?

With no lawyers provided for immigration hearings, some toddlers are left to make their own case

- JON DUFFY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

NOTHING CAN prepare you for the image of a child sitting alone in an American courtroom, expected to argue for her own right to safety.

Lucy is a 3-year-old girl in U.S. custody. She was one of 25 children scheduled to appear in immigration court in Arizona late last month. She could not climb into the chair on her own. A nonprofit attorney — unable to formally represent Lucy because her organization lost most of its federal funding earlier this year — lifted her into her seat and handed her a teddy bear to hold.

Lucy did not know where she was, nor did she understand the words being spoken around her. She could not possibly explain the dangers she had fled. And yet, under the system we have built, she was the one required to answer.

I felt grief before I felt anger—a heavy, stunned grief that this is who we have become: a nation willing to place the full weight of its legal machinery onto the shoulders of a toddler and then tell itself we're simply following process.

But beneath that grief sits a truth I cannot shake: that a child stood alone before an imposing power — a power that should have done everything it could to protect her, and it did not.