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.
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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.
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