https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration Immigration en-US Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:27:21 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/ice-extends-medical-payments Jackie Llanos The agency says Acentra Health is the only company up to the task. Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:27:21 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/ice-extends-medical-payments Immigration and Customs Enforcement extended this week a contract worth up to $982 million with the company hired to process medical claims for detainees.

Acentra Health this month launched the processing services for health providers caring for people in immigration detention, nearly a year after ICE originally contracted the company to pay out the claims, according to the company’s website.

During the lapse in claims processing the agency has racked up millions owed to ambulance services, hospitals and other providers. Detainees have received bills for medical care, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

And Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns that the lack of payment for off-site medical claims led to an increase in detainee deaths and health complications. Acentra Health has said government shutdowns caused the delay.

The Virginia-based company could get paid the sum to process the claims until Oct. 24, 2030, according to a federal contracting database.

So far, ICE has committed to paying the company nearly $134 million, according to the contracting database. ICE extended the work with Acentra Health on Tuesday, increasing the potential award amount, according to a government notice.

“Any lapse in the current medical claims management and provider payment support would create immediate and significant risks to [ICE Health Service Corps] operations and to the health and safety of the detained population,” a document ICE published Tuesday says. “Maintaining support through Acentra mitigates these risks because the contractor is already performing the required services.”

ICE rushed in October 2025 to find a contractor after the Department of Veterans Affairs abruptly ended the two decade-long agreement to handle the claims. The health care technology company has also processed medical claims for the VA since 2017, according to an FAQ page about the contract with ICE.

The agency originally awarded the contract to Acentra Health without any competition because it was urgent to hire a company to pay out the claims to ensure immigrants got timely critical medical care, according to a document from the agency.

Acentra Health remains the only contractor that can provide support immediately after the agency tried to identify other potential vendors in June, ICE stated in its justification for extending the contract on Tuesday. But the company repeatedly pushed back the date for when it would start processing the claims, first expected to begin by April 30.

Lindsey Rodarmer, Acentra Health’s public relations manager, told The Washington Sun in July that the Department of Homeland Security shutdown had delayed implementation of the system. The company was required to pause its work until it received an extension in June, according to its FAQ on the contract issue.

“Acentra Health began implementation work at its own financial risk in late October 2025, before receiving payment for that work,” the company website says. “This work included establishing technical environments, setting up data services and software configurations, and recruiting and training staff to support the letter contract.”
]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/former-data-tally-immigrants Jackie Llanos The Trump administration says 3 million immigrants left the U.S., but it has not explained how it reached that number. Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:03:00 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/former-data-tally-immigrants A former top statistics official who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security this summer says the government is overstating how many unauthorized immigrants have left the country during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Marc Rosenblum, whose blistering resignation letter from a decade-long career at DHS garnered national attention, is behind a new estimate published Thursday that says between 790,000 and 1.9 million immigrants departed the U.S. from Jan. 20, 2025, to July 31, 2026.

The Trump administration has said more than 3 million unauthorized immigrants have left during that period, but has not explained how it reached the number. The new analysis from the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank where Rosenblum is now a senior fellow, is an attempt to fill in the gap of information left by DHS’s lack of reporting.

“It's highly unlikely that 3 million total foreign-born [people] departed the United States in the first 18 months of the Trump administration, and even more unlikely that 3 million unauthorized immigrants departed during that time period,” Rosenblum said.

MPI’s analysis didn’t include immigrants who had lived in the U.S. less than a year because that wouldn’t match the common understanding of what it means to reduce the size of the unauthorized population, Rosenblum said.

The think tank said its estimate increases to 1.3 million to 2.4 million total departures — still short of the government’s number — when accounting for those who had been present in the country less than a year, as well as people turned around at the border without setting foot inside the U.S., whom the government does include in its count.

Rosenblum said DHS counts people who were turned aside at border entry points before entering the country as well as those who overstay visas by a few days. And the government doesn’t gather data on most people who leave the U.S. through the southern border, he said.

Researchers lack information about how the government counts that 3 million number. Republican lawmakers and immigration hawks have called for transparency from DHS, wanting to see the results of Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts.

The White House once again touted on Tuesday the more than 3 million departures, saying in a press release that it has deported or removed nearly 1.2 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said deportations are at a record high.

Although MPI’s analysis contests the department’s accounting of total departures, the think tank concluded that the number of immigrants who left was two to three times higher than in the past 12 years.

“Most of the numbers are not at all-time highs,” Rosenblum said.

Among other data, MPI used information forced out of the administration through public records lawsuits from the Deportation Data Project and Mexican census data capturing the number of the country’s nationals who returned after living in the U.S.

DHS hasn’t been responsive to requests for immigration enforcement data from the Oversight Project, a group that supports the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration and has filed two lawsuits demanding records on deportations and self-deportations.

“I have no reason to doubt the 3 million figures, but also have no reason to believe it until they release the actual data,” said Neal Cornett, the project’s director of state litigation. “It's just a claim from the Department of Homeland Security, and there should be data that they would have that would be able to confirm that.”

The Oversight Project requested records showing the number of immigrants who have self-deported via a Customs and Border Protection app and the amount of money DHS has spent on stipends for those immigrants, according to documents Cornett shared with The Washington Sun.

DHS gave the group an entirely redacted document on Oct. 8. The department claimed the records were protected under exemptions that shield law enforcement information that “would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigation or prosecution,” according to a letter DHS sent to the Oversight Project.

“It's not like we're asking the exact details of it, or how these people would be contacting them or anything like that,” Cornett said. “We just want to know what the numbers are.”

A White House spokesperson referred questions to DHS, which did not respond to requests for comment.]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/big-bend-border-wall-trump-supreme-court Manuela Silva The administration seeks to overturn a block on their construction plans on a 500-mile stretch of land at the southern border. Wed, 21 Oct 2026 21:38:42 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/big-bend-border-wall-trump-supreme-court The Trump administration on Wednesday filed an emergency appeal asking the Supreme Court to overturn a federal judge’s temporary block on its plans for a border wall and other construction in the Big Bend region.

At the center of the case is more than 500 miles of the southern border that make up the Big Bend region, which includes both state and national parks.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone instructed the Department of Homeland Security to reverse course and follow a slew of environmental and historical preservation laws the department had waived earlier this year. On Wednesday, Cardone denied DHS’ appeal that sought to allow the agency’s Big Bend region border plans to resume, leading the administration to bring the matter to the Supreme Court — arguing that the government would otherwise suffer irreparable harm.

“The district court found jurisdiction by flagrantly misreading this Court’s major-questions precedents; proceeded to find a major-questions problem where none exists; then rewrote IIRIRA to hamstring the Secretary’s waiver analysis,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the appeal, referring to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, a Clinton-era law that expanded border enforcement.

“Those errors are so obvious that this Court can swiftly correct them on the merits without further briefing or oral argument,” Sauer wrote.

Landowners and local leaders have pushed back on the administration’s plans for the region for months, citing concerns about construction’s potential to impact the natural environment and questioning the need for additional border wall infrastructure.

Bob Kreumanker, the chair of Keep Big Bend Wild and a former superintendent of Big Bend National Park, said the Supreme Court should “reject this government overreach.”

“The secrecy, the shifting stories, and the refusal to work with local landowners and businesses have angered West Texans and people across the country, and that opposition crosses party lines,” Kreumenaker wrote in a statement. “This is the epitome of government overreach and a betrayal of Texas’ Gift to the Nation.”]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/doj-wants-judges-kicked Derek Hawkins Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward argued in court filings that the judges’ “improper political commentary” raised doubts about their ability to fairly adjudicate the cases. Wed, 21 Oct 2026 21:12:29 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/doj-wants-judges-kicked The Justice Department is demanding two federal judges in Minnesota step aside from overseeing two immigration-related cases because of their public comments about the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the state.

In court papers filed Tuesday, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward argued that the judges broke ethical rules in speaking on the record with The New York Times last month about the chaos surrounding last winter’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

Woodward accused the judges of “improper political commentary” that he said raised doubts about their ability to fairly adjudicate the cases. Federal law, Woodward wrote, “compels recusal when a judge’s partiality might reasonably be questioned.”

A court spokesperson declined to comment on the DOJ’s filings, citing rules preventing judges from discussing pending cases.

One of the motions filed by Woodward this week calls for Judge Patrick Schiltz to be disqualified from a case in which the administration is seeking to revoke citizenship from a Somali American who was convicted of supporting terrorists.

Schiltz, who served as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota during the surge, told the Times that the administration’s repeated violations of court orders had strained the judiciary’s relationship with the DOJ and “created a grave threat to the rule of law.” He attributed the problem largely to incompetence and staffing shortages, and he declined to discuss ongoing cases, according to the Sept. 17 article.

The judge said he hoped his account of the strain caused by the surge would help the public understand how the U.S. government depends on the rule of law.

Woodward’s other filing seeks to disqualify Judge John Tunheim from a case charging a South African woman with falsely claiming U.S. citizenship and voting illegally in Minnesota.

Tunheim told the Times that immigration agents “weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street.”

Woodward said the article “advances an anti-Trump Administration agenda in the immigration context” and that Schiltz and Tunheim were effectively taking sides against the administration by participating in it.

The assistant attorney general also argued that the judges were not protected by the advisory opinion issued this year by the judiciary’s Committee on Codes of Conduct, which loosened restrictions on what judges can say about the rule of law.

Under federal law, judges whose impartiality is questioned by parties in their courtroom have discretion over whether to recuse themselves. If Schiltz and Tunheim decline to recuse themselves, the government can appeal.

The attempt to remove the judges from their individual cases comes three weeks after DOJ officials filed a misconduct complaint demanding that nearly all the district’s judges recuse themselves from immigration matters.

The misconduct complaint alleged that anonymous and on-the-record comments by the judges to the Times violated the federal bench’s code of conduct, which generally bars jurists from commenting on pending cases or making political or policy statements on issues before them.

The DOJ wants the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles misconduct complaints from Minnesota’s federal district court, to force the judges to recuse themselves from cases involving the Department of Homeland Security.

A court spokesperson said at the time that the judges’ remarks were well within ethical guidelines, adding that the federal judiciary had recently issued an advisory opinion that judges may speak and write “on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence.”
]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/congress/dick-durbin-retirement-exit-interview-dream-act Paul Kane The longest-serving Democratic Whip put the Dream Act on the map but leaves without its passage. Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:10:00 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/congress/dick-durbin-retirement-exit-interview-dream-act Sen. Richard J. Durbin spent more than two decades advising Democratic leaders what to do. But his most important recommendation might have come 20 years ago at Chicago’s Union League when he pulled aside his junior colleague for some advice.

“I'm in a hurry, Dick,” then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) told Durbin, who said it would only take a minute.

“You've got to run for president,” Durbin told the future 44th president. “You're young enough that if you lose, you get another chance. But you've got something, buddy, that I've never seen in anybody.”

Obama had other people in his ear encouraging him to launch a presidential campaign after not quite two years as a senator, but Durbin was the only senator making that call publicly and privately. Two years later they were back in Chicago and Obama made history with his sweeping 2008 victory.

Durbin recalled that moment with Obama during a taping of The Washington Sun Cast video podcast that covered a 44-year career spanning a productive 14 years in the House followed by three decades in the Senate.

Advising people at the top became his forte. Durbin, 81, who is retiring in early January, ends his career as the longest serving party whip in Senate history, 22 straight years as the No. 2 leader behind Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) and Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

He has served on the Senate Judiciary Committee for three decades, including confirmation hearings for eight of the nine Supreme Court justices. The past six years he has served as chair or ranking Democrat on the panel.

And he learned how to navigate around ambitious personalities from his first days in Congress, when a group of nearly 80 incoming House freshmen for the class of 1982 met during orientation.

Those newcomers included a young Reid, future Republican presidential nominee John McCain (R-Arizona), future governors such as Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), John Kasich (R-Ohio) and Bill Richardson (D-New Mexico).

Durbin got elected as the head of the Democratic class, along with his longtime friend and future senator, Barbara Boxer (D-California), while McCain headed up the Republican class.

Now considered a liberal stalwart, Durbin linked arms with moderates in those days to work on issues like balancing the budget. “Tip O'Neill at the time viewed most of us as traitors and kind of kept an eye on us,” he said of the House speaker.

It was a different era when power was consolidated with committee and subcommittee chairs, not in the leadership suites where it resides in today’s Congress. So Durbin’s most passionate cause at the time — fighting smoking after his father died from lung cancer at 53 — ran up against several different power brokers who represented tobacco states or were chain smokers themselves.

His first step was to ban cigarette smoking on flights, against the wishes of Democratic and Republican leaders. “Nobody had beaten big tobacco. But the folks on the other side didn't count on the fact that the House of Representatives was the largest frequent flyer club in America and they were sick and tired of secondhand smoke,” Durbin recalled.

His final move required getting past the legendary House Rules Committee chair, Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Florida), who shocked the young Durbin by ruling his amendment into a package that went to the House floor.

Pepper privately explained afterward that his greatest accomplishment was creating the National Cancer Institute and he would join Durbin in his battle. The tobacco industry has been on the run ever since.

“When I took this issue on, 29% of high school students in America smoked tobacco cigarettes — 29%! Today it's 2%. This has changed the world,” Durbin said.

After Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential campaign and plucked Leon Panetta (D-California) out of the House to become budget director, Rep. George Miller (D-California) needed a new roommate to fill out his townhouse that had become a hub for rising star Democrats. Durbin got tapped, joining Schumer for about two decades of roommate status and periodic jockeying over who would win which leadership post.

In 1996 Durbin’s mentor, Paul Simon (D-Illinois), retired from the Senate. Durbin jumped into a crowded primary and blew away the field, eventually winning the general election by almost 16 points.

He won the next four reelection battles by double-digit margins, helping cement Illinois’ reputation as a Democratic stronghold.

His greatest honor, yet his greatest disappointment, came on the DREAM Act, legislation he crafted 25 years ago to grant permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants brought here as young children who then grew up in the United States.

A few Democrats and almost all Republicans voted to block consideration of the legislation in December 2010, when dozens of Dreamers had filled the public gallery hoping for the act’s passage. He told them later that day that he would not give up, and Obama did sign an executive order implementing parts of his law. Durbin will pass that torch to several younger Democrats when he leaves in January.
Dick Durbin, Dream Act (4896x3264, AR: 1.50)Far from the House moderate of the 1980s, in the Senate, Durbin gained a quick reputation as a liberal who could be a sharp partisan when he felt the need, particularly on the Judiciary Committee. The confirmation battles over judges in the late Clinton years and the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency set the stage for rules changes that would be implemented by Reid and future Republican majority leaders, using the “nuclear option” to ease filibuster constraints.



Not long before the former majority leader died five years ago, Durbin said he and Reid spoke about their decision to take the first party-line step to break filibuster constraints in 2013.



“He was warned ahead of time there would be retribution. It all occurred and we're still suffering from that. Harry, before he passed away, he and I talked about it. He said the Senate will never be the same,” Durbin said, adding that Reid felt “he had no choice” but to do it.



He’s careful not to tell his current colleagues what they should do in the future. But he’s not very supportive of trying to further blow up the institutional guardrails in order to do things now demanded by the party’s most liberal faithful, such as expanding the Supreme Court.



If he were chairing the Judiciary Committee next year and President Donald Trump had the chance to nominate a new justice, Durbin seems inclined to not block the nominee the way Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) blocked the 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland.



At least hold a hearing, he thinks, and vote the nominee down.



Durbin’s biggest complaint, one that would take an uprising from rank-and-file on both sides of the aisle to fix, is that too much power has been concentrated in the “four corners, whatever you want to call it.”



That’s the House speaker, House minority leader, Senate majority leader and Senate minority leader, who often at the end of a legislative session make calls about what legislation gets tacked on to some must-pass bill.



Part of the problem comes from rank-and-file lawmakers in both chambers afraid of their political shadows asking party leaders to save them from having to take tough votes on amendments, leading to a bottled-up process.



“The notion that the next vote's gonna cost you the next election is an exaggeration,” Durbin said. “I've cast 17,000 votes in the House and the Senate. I decided a long time ago I got plenty of votes for anybody to hang me with if they wish.”



But it’s also a function of power-hungry party leaders. “It's no longer up to the body on the floor, it's up to a handful of leaders in rooms that I don't have access to,” he said.



How does the second-in-command not have access to those decisions?



“It’s a great piece of real estate,” he said of an office that for 22 years sat directly above Reid and Schumer’s in the northwest wing of the Capitol.



Durbin said that his decision to retire came from his “degree in geriatrics,” watching several colleagues over the years stick around too long.



He’s ready to retire without any real regrets.



“There reaches a point when you're just not as on the ball as you once were. I did not want to reach that point and be in the middle of a Senate term,” he said. “I wanted to walk out the front door of this great institution rather than be carried out the back.”]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/researchers-immigration-dismantled-system Jackie Llanos The way immigration courts are functioning is a facade, one of the authors of a new report said. Tue, 20 Oct 2026 21:47:54 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/researchers-immigration-dismantled-system Across 13 states and thousands of cases, observers from a national court-watching initiative documented how Trump administration policies led immigration judges to quickly end cases for procedural reasons, according to a new report.

The findings from California State University, Long Beach, and Princeton University published Monday outline the mechanisms immigration courts under the Justice Department are deploying to short circuit due process. The researchers concluded deportations under this system amount to “procedural removal,” or removals based on administrative process instead of a full and fair consideration of the facts of a person’s claim to relief.

“What we see happening now is a kind of hollowing out of the content of immigration court while maintaining the facade of a judicial process,” said Princeton professor Amelia Frank-Vitale, one of the authors of the report.

Frank-Vitale and co-author Lauren Heidbrink, a professor at Cal State, Long Beach, said their report is the first of this magnitude that delves into the court processes of the second Trump administration. From January to August, researchers and university students observed nearly 3,600 hearings.

“It's not just about the outcomes, right?” Heidbrink said. “It's the process at which decisions are being made, so, in some ways, we're unmasking what those statistics actually mean.”

While the Department of Homeland Security maintains that all immigrants receive “FULL due process,” immigration judges are agreeing with the department’s attorneys to shut down cases before weighing the evidence, denials called pretermissions.

Frank-Vitale said she started noticing last summer that immigration judges were considering pretermissions at a greater scale than previous administrations. DHS is also moving to end the cases through pretermissions to send immigrants to countries they are not from, the report states.

She compared it to a criminal court where a defendant doesn’t want to take a plea deal. “It is the judge saying, ‘You know what? I'm looking at this paper filing that the cop produced, and I think you're guilty so we don't have to have a hearing,’” Frank-Vitale said.

Court observers for the report sat in on 235 hearings involving third-country removals, 90% of which happened during master calendar hearings meant for administrative functionings like scheduling. Immigration judges ordered removal of 58% of the people DHS sought to send to a country they weren’t citizens of, according to the report.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed more than 25,000 people to more than 30 countries they’re not citizens of, according to the Third Country Deportation Watch. The Supreme Court last month allowed the Trump administration to carry out the third-country deportations without advance notice.

A ruling this month from the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld judges’ ability to pretermit cases without DHS attorneys asking them to do so.

Immigration judges’ compliance with DHS varies across the courts, according to the court observers. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has removed roughly 1 in 6 immigration judges, according to the report, replacing some with military attorneys.

Sirce Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, praised the qualifications of 47 new judges in a press release announcing their swearing in last month. “Immigration judge positions are critical to the Administration’s goal of reducing the immigration court backlog, and to restoring integrity to our immigration system,” Owen said.

Immigration judges closer to retirement were more likely to scrutinize the government’s actions because they are not afraid of getting fired, Heidbrink said.

Nearly all asylum cases are being denied as the Trump administration pushes for the judges to speed through the backlog of more than three million cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. And former and current immigration judges previously told The Washington Sun that the administration has overhauled the system to limit their latitude.

“Again, you're narrowing the universe in which judges can judge,” Heidbrink said.]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/dhs-punts-ending-tps-ukraine-sudan Jackie Llanos The Trump administration has also delayed ending temporary protections for immigrants from El Salvador. Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:25:03 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/dhs-punts-ending-tps-ukraine-sudan More than 105,000 people from Ukraine and Sudan will keep their deportation protections that were set to end Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced Sunday.

The move keeps those immigrants under the temporary protected status, which allows them to live and work in the U.S. Although that status was set to end Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not issue an official decision to terminate TPS for Ukraine and Sudan.

DHS issued the same statement for both countries Sunday, saying that an announcement would be made at an appropriate time and Ukrainians and Sudanese people in the country under TPS would retain protection.

The announcement comes after DHS left immigrants from El Salvador in the same state of limbo after the designation expired for the Central American country last month. But the Trump administration, with the backing of the Supreme Court, has moved to wipe the temporary protection designations for most of the countries that had them, including by targeting Haitians who sought refuge in the U.S. after their protections ended in July.

Congress established TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries deemed too unsafe because of armed conflict, natural disasters or other humanitarian crises.

Approximately 103,700 Ukrainians and 1,900 Sudanese people are beneficiaries of the program, according to DHS. The Biden administration granted TPS for Ukraine in 2022 because of the war with Russia, and Sudanese immigrants have had the status for nearly 30 years because of the ongoing armed conflict, displacement of millions inside the country and famine.

A bipartisan group of Senators had introduced a bill in September extending TPS for Ukrainians.

“The reality is that it is simply not safe for them to return to Ukraine,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said in a statement announcing the legislation. “We should not force Ukrainians who we allowed into the U.S. and who are here legally and contributing to our communities back into an active war zone.”]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/groups-backing-california-voting Adora Brown The groups say the Trump administration’s lawsuit over 20,000 potential noncitizens who received a mail-in ballot defies “basic standards of decency.” Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:01:32 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/groups-backing-california-voting Voting rights groups want to quickly step into the Justice Department’s lawsuit against California as the Trump administration seeks to block the state from counting the votes of over 20,000 people it says could be noncitizen voters.

The League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a filing Friday, said the DOJ’s actions “flout the law, disregard the realities of election administration, and defy basic standards of decency — all while voting is underway.”

The DOJ gave California a letter and a password-protected thumb drive, along with the password attached on a sticky note, with a list of voters it believed were potential noncitizens who received a mail-in ballot through California’s universal vote-by-mail system.

The state was given 48 hours to comply with checking whether each citizen was a voter, which would have meant checking 417 names per hour. Now, the DOJ is suing California for not complying with that letter.

LULAC and the NAACP argue that they can intervene as organizations that represent vulnerable groups to protect civil and political rights. They also argue that their interference is not premature because of the looming deadline of Election Day.

“The Federal Government seeks to control which voters may remain on California’s voter rolls, which ballots get counted, and which steps voters must take to prove their citizenship,” the filing says. “Such drastic alterations to California election procedures — sought at the eleventh hour — would have immense effects on [the voting groups’] election-related work and their members’ ability to vote.”

The administration is not backing down from pursuing California’s voters. Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told Fox News on Friday that the government would be seeking an emergency order forcing California to set those 20,000 ballots aside.

The groups’ request could be denied by the court, though Friday’s request also mentions that the case has yet to get a judge or set a date.

“They are only interested in protecting California voters’ and their members’ ability to engage in meaningful political participation, including casting a ballot and having that ballot counted alongside the ballots of other eligible California voters,” the groups’ filing says.]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/groups-suing-child-asylum Domonique King Trump administration policies give short notice for interviews of children who arrived in the U.S. without a parent. Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:42:57 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/groups-suing-child-asylum A group of legal service providers for immigrant families filed a lawsuit Thursday in an effort to halt Trump administration policies they say are unlawfully rushing the deportation of children seeking asylum after arriving in the U.S. without a parent.

The providers say U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office for Immigration Review have recently started giving short notice of asylum interviews to unaccompanied children and their attorneys and blocking attorneys from rescheduling interviews, even when they’ve been double-booked.

“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. “For these children, who risk being sent back to the countries they fled, the stakes could not be higher.“

It’s worse for detained unaccompanied children, who are told they must immediately file asylum applications and are given only 24 hours before an interview, the lawsuit says. Immigration judges have been ordered to complete all those cases by Jan. 31.

The six groups bringing the federal lawsuit in Maryland are Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, The Door, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, and Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh.

Lawyers for the groups said USCIS’s and EOIR’s policies break from decades of bipartisan legislation in which Congress declared migrant children who arrive in the U.S. unaccompanied as “uniquely vulnerable,” and therefore entitled to the right to a non-adversarial interview and representation by “qualified, independent attorneys.”

Now, they say the agencies are expediting a process that would normally take weeks to a matter of days. The groups say they’ve collectively received more than 600 notices of asylum interviews since August 1.

The complaint noted examples of children being required to continue asylum interviews even though they are visibly distressed and of attorneys frantically coordinating simultaneous interviews after their requests to reschedule have been ignored or denied.

“The United States guarantees unaccompanied children an immigration system that meets their unique needs. EOIR’s and USCIS’s new policies make those guarantees a hollow promise,” the lawsuit says. “This is not the immigration process that Congress intended for unaccompanied children; it is a deportation assembly line depriving them of their rights.”

The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
]]> https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/cities-supreme-court-immigration-rule Jackie Llanos The cities in Maryland, Ohio and Connecticut say the Justice Department and Texas used a court to flout the typical rulemaking process. Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:48:07 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/legal/cities-supreme-court-immigration-rule Three cities and a legal group asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to revive a Biden-era immigration rule, arguing the Justice Department and Texas colluded to eliminate it.

At issue is a 2024 rule that allowed immigration judges, who are Justice Department employees, to close deportation proceedings against people in the process of gaining lawful status.

In an application, the cities — Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; and New Haven, Connecticut — and California-based nonprofit Centro Legal de la Raza contend the Justice Department unlawfully got rid of the regulation instead of going through the established rulemaking process.

A federal judge in Texas entered a judgment in June that halted the rule nationwide on the same day the state challenged the rule in court. Hours after Texas filed the suit, the state and Justice Department asked the court to declare the rule unlawful and bar the department from enacting similar policies in the future.

“The government did not merely leverage a convenient loss to undo agency action, but rather, announced in advance that it would not defend a disfavored regulation and then colluded with the challenger from the moment that suit was filed,” the application says.

“The result is that a significant regulation that established certain important procedures in immigration courts was erased over the course of a single day, without meaningful judicial review, public participation, or adherence to the [Administrative Procedure Act’s] rulemaking requirements,” the application says.

The cities want the Supreme Court to stop the judgment while the legal case plays out. The rule was meant to spare victims of crimes or neglected children from having to defend themselves in immigration courts while undergoing a process to gain immigration relief from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the application states.

Some removals are permanent, such as a child qualifying for special immigrant juvenile status who is removed before a visa becomes available, the application says.

“If the judgment remains in force while Applicants’ appeal proceeds, it will stand as a working template for any administration that wishes to repeal a regulation without notice and comment,” the application says.

The Justice Department denied the claim of collusion in a September court filing.

“The Department cannot be required to defend a rule it believes is unlawful, and it must follow any orders courts entered against it,” a filing to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says.

Texas’ lawsuit came two months after Sirce Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, issued a memo announcing the office would not defend the rule in court.

“EOIR’s use of administrative closure, particularly between 2011 and 2017 and between 2021 and 2025, was an unmitigated disaster from a policy standpoint and strongly appears to have also been unlawful,” Owen wrote.

The cities sought to intervene in the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, but a judge found they lacked the legal right to do so. The 5th Circuit declined last month to block the judgement throwing out the rule.]]>