Legal service providers that help unaccompanied children navigate the immigration court system warned on Wednesday that the children's due process rights are at risk after the Trump administration turned off the federal funding tap.

The Trump administration on Tuesday ordered nonprofits like Immigrant Defenders Law Center, aka ImmDef, to immediately halt their work. The order instantly cut the organizations off from government contract funds they rely on to provide legal services to unaccompanied children who crossed the border alone.

"There's a gamut of legal services that are essentially being foreclosed at this moment in time, that are a complete dismantling of the cornerstones of due process that are meant to be there to protect children, who now will have to navigate immigration court proceedings on their own," Lillian Aponte, executive director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, told reporters during a press call.

Many of these children, some of whom have fled sexual violence or forced labor, would qualify for asylum, or other forms of immigration status like special immigrant juvenile classification, which allows unaccompanied minors who have been neglected, abused or abandoned by one or both parents to get green cards.

Having legal representation is key to their success in immigration court, where they will otherwise confront "the full force of the government" in their immigration cases on their own, Aponte said.

According to Aponte, 26,000 unaccompanied children are receiving direct legal representation through the Legal Services for Unaccompanied Children program. The organizations also give unaccompanied children legal education and individual consultations, and appear as friends of the court to help unrepresented noncitizens understand their rights in removal proceedings.

The U.S. Interior Department issued the stop work order on Tuesday, saying it was "being implemented due to causes outside of your control and should not be misconstrued as an indication of poor performance."

The Interior Department handles contracting for the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. A component of HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, oversees the unaccompanied children program.

Litigation challenging the legality of the stop work order is possible, Michael Lukens, executive director of Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said during the press call.

"There are very strong arguments that this is not an action that should be upheld following judicial scrutiny," he said.

The order, if not soon reversed, could financially tank the organizations, said Susan Reed, the director of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.

While Reed said the organization has vowed to carry on with its work, its ability to do it in the long run is another matter.

"Our organization is in financial free fall right now, and so there may come a time where we do have to withdraw from our cases, lay off our staff," she said.

Some of the children these organizations serve are as young as 5 months old, according to Lindsay Toczylowski, president and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Others are young girls who survived trafficking and were raped on their journeys to the U.S., she said.

In many cases, the groups' legal representation is the only thing preventing some children from being deported to places where they might be harmed.

"This is about child welfare. And the question becomes, is the American public okay with attacks on the programs that serve the most vulnerable amongst us? I am not. We are not at ImmDef," Toczylowski said. "We will see this administration in court."

--Editing by Brian Baresch.