Sofia, 19, has a soft spot for animals. She pulls out her phone to show me a tiny kitten she rescued at the beach near Galveston. She found him so young his eyes were still closed.

The beach is one of Sofia’s favorite places since she moved to the U.S. five years ago. She traveled here alone with her younger brother. At the time, she was eager to attend high school. But her guardian in Houston, a family member, told her she had to work instead.

“He said, ‘You’re not going to study, you’re going to work,’” she said.

Sofia said that all her wages went to her guardian to pay rent. We’re not using her real name because of her open immigration case. Sofia worked long hours at fast food jobs, where she’d break down and cry because she wanted to be studying.

“And I would cry night and day,” she said.

But Sofia had a secret weapon: her legal team. She had been connected to them through a federally funded program for unaccompanied minors.

When she told them she was being forced to work they said, “‘You have the right to [go to] school,'“ Sofia said.

And with the legal team’s help, Sofia got to finish high school. Today, she’s got her own apartment, a retail job and she said that one day she’d like to be a vet or a teacher.

Now, the program that helped protect Sofia is ending.

Health and Human Services is eliminating funding designated by Congress to protect immigrant children from exploitation. The funding supported 26,000 unaccompanied minors with their immigration cases.

Layoffs have also hit legal aid groups across the country that help the tens of thousands of kids who cross the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves — young people who are uniquely vulnerable to forced labor once they get to the United States.

For now, the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project will stick with Sofia’s case because of other funding streams. But they are among the legal aid groups having to cut staff.

“This loss of funding was almost 50% of our organizational budget, and it's almost half of our staff,” said Alexa Sendukas, who heads up the immigrant children program.

While she said that it’s hard to see attorneys lose their jobs, “they’re mostly concerned for the children.”

Her group represents some 300 clients who came to the U.S. as children without a parent or sponsor.

“We don't intend to withdraw from our cases, but other organizations are having to do that right now, and we're also thinking of all the hundreds of thousands of other children who are not going to receive legal services because of this termination of funding,” Sendukas said.

Without legal advocates, University of Arizona’s Shefali Milczarek-Desai worries that kids who were already at risk will be even more exposed to trafficking and exploitation.

“I haven't seen any evidence that the insatiable demand that America has for low-wage labor has disappeared,” Milczarek-Desai said.

Industries will keep seeking cheap child labor, she said. So with this funding going away, “exploitation will continue and will be worse because there won't be anyone providing legal information and assistance to these children.”

Legal groups have sued to bring back this Congressionally-approved funding — for now a bare-bones legal orientation program remains, and only for a short time. HHS didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story.