Six Legal Groups Sue Trump Administration Over Short-Notice Asylum Interviews for Unaccompanied Children

Six legal aid organizations sued the Trump administration on Thursday, Oct. 15, claiming federal agencies are pushing unaccompanied migrant children through asylum proceedings too fast for a fair hearing.

The case is The Door v. Edlow, No. 8:26-cv-04326-DLB, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division. The plaintiffs are the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, The Door, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, and Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh.

They are represented by the National Immigration Law Center, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the National Center for Youth Law, and Trial Impact Project. The defendants are USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Acting EOIR Director Sirce Owen, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Department of Justice.

What the complaint alleges

The plaintiffs say U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has cut the notice it gives children before asylum interviews, in some cases to less than 24 hours. They say the earlier practice was at least 21 days' notice.

They also allege that attorneys are being blocked from rescheduling interviews even when they are double-booked. The groups say they have collectively received more than 600 interview notices since Aug. 1, 2026, many scheduled in quick succession.

The complaint says that forces lawyers to handle multiple interviews on the same day, sometimes at the same time, with little time to prepare.

On the court side, the plaintiffs allege the Department of Justice has instructed immigration judges to complete all removal proceedings for detained unaccompanied children by Jan. 31, 2027. To meet that deadline, they allege, judges are refusing continuances longer than three weeks.

Detained children, the complaint says, are told they must immediately file asylum applications and are given only 24 hours before an interview. It also alleges children are being required to appear in court multiple times per month.

The complaint cites one child with a documented heart condition who had been hospitalized for a cardiac event the evening before her asylum interview. When USCIS went ahead with the interview the next day, she became so distressed that a supervising asylum officer finally agreed to reschedule, but only after repeatedly refusing to let her attorney intercede, according to the complaint.

"This is not the immigration process that Congress intended for unaccompanied children; it is a deportation assembly line depriving them of their rights," the complaint states.

The suit leans on the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the bipartisan law passed nearly two decades ago to give unaccompanied children special protections. It also invokes the Administrative Procedure Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Fifth Amendment. The complaint calls for a return to the status quo.

Neha Desai, an attorney from Children's Human Rights & Dignity who is on the case, told Newsweek it used to be rare for children to have to appear in court multiple times and file an asylum claim before being reunited with family. "Now, kids are being ordered removed within a week or two of arriving in the U.S. because they have not yet filed an asylum claim," she said.

Jason Boyd, vice president for federal policy at Kids in Need of Defense, called it "a coordinated whole-of-government operation that abandons due process and child safety in service of faster removals."

The government's response

A Justice Department official said the department could not comment on ongoing litigation. The official added that hearings could not be scheduled at short notice unless an attorney or the immigrant requests it, and that all cases were decided in accordance with applicable law.

The administration has previously denied claims that cases are being fast-tracked, arguing that officials prioritize timely completion of cases. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

That leaves a direct factual dispute. The plaintiffs say the short notices came from the agencies. The DOJ official says short-notice hearings happen only on request. A court will have to sort out which account matches the scheduling records.

The lawyer gap

The suit lands against a backdrop of shrinking legal help. The plaintiffs say the government allowed the contract under which they provided legal services to lapse earlier this year.

Heather Yountz, a senior immigration attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, put the timing at July 31, 2026, when the contracts were set to be renewed. She said about $65 million was lost and more than 24,000 children lost funding for their representation.

Yountz also said funding had not been provided since December 2025 and that, in late 2025, the administration offered funding on the condition that providers hand over confidential information about the children. Those are her claims. The administration has not been quoted responding to them.

Unaccompanied children have no requirement for legal representation in immigration court. Like adults, they must present evidence to back up their asylum claims. That is why the short interview notices matter to the plaintiffs: with fewer lawyers available, each child's preparation window is the main protection left.

Earlier this month, the federal government quietly assembled a team of government attorneys to represent migrant children in court after the administration cut ties with a number of advocacy groups that had previously provided those services. Immigration advocacy groups have argued that the same government seeking to deport the minors should not be representing them in court.

Pressure from several directions

Two days before the filing, DHS announced it was offering unaccompanied migrant children $3,000 to self-deport, a $500 increase over last year's incentive.

Immigration court backlogs have grown in recent years. Newsweek reported that pending unaccompanied-children cases peaked at 61,648 in fiscal year 2021 and had fallen to 16,560 by July 2026, though roughly 60 percent of those had been pending more than five years. The administration's position is that officials prioritize timely completion of cases. The legal question is whether speed has crossed the line set by the 2008 law and the Constitution's due process guarantee.

Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said on a press call: "A system that moves faster and that is by design made so that children are unable to access lawyers and are railroaded into deportation orders is not justice. It's assembly line deportation of the most vulnerable among us."

The government's formal response in court is the next marker. Until a judge rules, the Jan. 31, 2027 deadline for detained children's cases stays in place, and so does the dispute over who asked for the short-notice hearings.