The Trump administration is speeding up the asylum cases of children who came to the United States alone, giving them almost no time to make their case, according to six legal aid groups that represent them.
Children in detention who arrived without a parent are now being told to file their asylum applications immediately, and then given 24 hours before their asylum interview. Immigration judges have been ordered to finish all of those cases by January 31.
That's according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, October 15, in Maryland by six legal aid groups that represent these children, The Washington Sun reported. The groups are the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, The Door, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, and Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh.
What changed
The two agencies that handle these cases, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Justice Department's immigration courts, have recently started:
- Sending interview notices to children and their lawyers on very short notice.
- Refusing to let lawyers reschedule, even when the same lawyer has been booked for two interviews at once.
- For detained children, requiring an asylum application right away and holding the interview a day later.
The groups say they have received more than 600 interview notices since August 1. A process that normally takes weeks now takes days.
"Their attorneys are expected to represent children in multiple asylum interviews on the same day, sometimes at the same time, forcing them to forgo preparation and severely limiting their ability to effectively represent their unaccompanied child clients," the lawsuit says.
The complaint describes children being made to continue interviews while visibly distressed, and lawyers scrambling to cover interviews scheduled at the same time after their requests to reschedule were ignored or denied.
Why Congress said these kids get extra protection
These children have special protections in law for a reason. Over decades, and with votes from both parties, Congress declared that children who arrive alone are "uniquely vulnerable." That's why they get a non-adversarial asylum interview, not a courtroom fight, and the right to "qualified, independent attorneys," the groups' lawyers said.
"This is not the immigration process that Congress intended for unaccompanied children; it is a deportation assembly line depriving them of their rights," the lawsuit says.
The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to the Sun's requests for comment.
Part of a pattern
This isn't the first time the administration has gone after the protections these children rely on. It has already tried to withhold the money that pays for their lawyers, which would leave kids to face deportation court alone. In Arizona, a judge told a 1-year-old to file an asylum application. And the administration has been deporting immigrant kids at triple the rate.
Now the children who do get lawyers are getting lawyers who have a day to prepare.
What we know
The Trump administration's immigration agencies have started rushing asylum cases for children who arrived in the U.S. without a parent: detained children must file immediately and are interviewed 24 hours later, lawyers can't reschedule even when double-booked, and immigration judges must finish these cases by January 31. Six legal aid groups that have received more than 600 interview notices since August 1 sued on October 15 to stop it, calling it "a deportation assembly line."
