Immigration attorneys have been receiving letters requiring them to file paperwork on behalf of unaccompanied minors within about 30 days or risk having their young clients deported. They say they’ve never seen immigration court notices like these before, and they’re sounding the alarm about the potential dangers to their clients.
“The immediate concern is if we don't file something with the immigration court, the court is going to find them removable,” explained immigration lawyer Alexandra Rizio. “Which means at any given moment, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] could show up at their door and physically remove them from the country.”
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Rizio is a managing attorney at the Safe Passage Project, a non-profit in New York City that represents about 1,200 unaccompanied minors. It’s the largest of several local groups that provide free legal services to these children.
Unaccompanied minors are children who make the dangerous trek to the U.S. by themselves, sometimes with a sibling or with someone other than a parent. Usually they’re escaping violent conditions in Central America such as gangs. The kids have been coming in waves over the past decade, and although most are teenagers, some are younger.
Like other migrants, the minors are allowed to file for asylum if they’re claiming persecution. They can also get a special visa if they were abandoned or abused by a parent. These processes can take years. In the meantime, the kids are typically detained in shelters before being cleared to stay with relatives in the U.S. while their cases are ushered along by immigration judges.
Rizio said more than a dozen Safe Passage clients received the urgent court notices this fall, which are called scheduling orders. The only thing the clients had in common was that they had immigration court hearings that were postponed due to the pandemic. The brief letters had nearly identical language, giving the minors about a month to file new paperwork.
Other organizations that represent unaccompanied minors in New York, Boston and around the country said they also started getting the notices this fall. Though only a small percentage of their clients are affected so far, they said they had to scramble to meet the deadlines and they worry more notices may be coming.
Anthony Enriquez, who runs the unaccompanied minors program at Catholic Charities Community Services in New York, said the letters caused a commotion because the extra paperwork they required wasn’t simple. It’s also not entirely clear what the court is seeking.
“Now, in the middle of a pandemic - where, frankly, it's just not too safe to be meeting with our clients in the office and in communal settings - you're asking us to within 30 days assemble a very factually complex application,” he explained.
A new asylum package often includes asking a kid to revisit their deepest traumas and tracking down paperwork in other countries. Attorneys said some of the letters also had incorrect information or arrived late in the mail, giving them very little time to meet their deadlines.
“It's very unfortunate because the short time frames mean that we weren't able to put forward the best case possible on behalf of our clients that we would have been able to, had we had more time,” said Elisa Gahng, managing attorney for Kids in Need of Defense. She said the organization’s 10 offices all over the country got the letters.
Attorneys said the additional deadlines are unnecessary because the kids are usually waiting on other agencies to process paperwork. The kids claiming they were abused or neglected need family court judges to appoint them guardians so they can apply for a visa through the Special Immigrant Juvenile process. Gahng noted family courts were often closed during the pandemic. Minors seeking asylum often apply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Immigration judges would normally schedule hearings just to make sure things are moving ahead, because the children were technically placed in removal proceedings after crossing the border.
The Trump administration has spent nearly four years making it harder for migrants to conform with restrictive immigration policies and win asylum. Less than 30 percent of asylum seekers won their cases in immigration courts this year, compared to 45 percent in the last year of former president Barack Obama's administration.
Many immigration lawyers wondered if the letters represented another attempt by a departing president to impose additional hurdles for migrants. “Definitely our first instinct was to say they're targeting young people for removal,” said Enriquez.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts. It won’t say how many of these letters were sent or why, despite several queries from Gothamist/WNYC.
But the immigration courts have been struggling to manage a backlog that’s now approaching 1.3 million cases, according to TRAC at Syracuse University, more than double the number since Trump took office. The new notices could be one more attempt to speed things along. The administration also announced an “enhanced case flow processing model,” this month, due to the pandemic.
Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said her union was never consulted about the new deadlines for unaccompanied minors. The letters came from immigration court higher-ups, not the individual judges assigned to the cases.
“What is extremely problematic is the direct interference with the judge's decision-making authority,” she explained. “These are cases that are assigned to immigration judges for them to handle.”
John Martin, a spokesman for EOIR’s New York office, said immigration judges “have longstanding authority to set application filing deadlines.” But he didn’t address the union’s complaint that the letters were sent from supervisors and not individual judges hearing the cases.
Tabaddor calls this another effort to impose what she calls “assembly line justice.” The Trump administration has hired new immigration judges to alleviate the backlog, but it’s also taken away some of the judges’ flexibility over their dockets and set case completion quotas. A whole new set or rules will take effect in January making it tougher for judges to grant asylum to people fleeing violence from gangs or based on their gender.
The judges union wants to separate the immigration courts from the Justice Department. The Trump administration, in response, has been trying to decertify the union.
The unaccompanied minors whose cases are now being rushed aren’t aware of all the politics. Gothamist/WNYC spoke to a 21 year-old whose lawyer called him in late November -- he presumed it was good news.
“I thought my case was moving forward, I thought it was going fast,” he recalled. He declined to give his name, because he said his life was in danger in Honduras.
The young man applied for a special visa earlier this year after a family court judge in Queens found he’d been abandoned by his parents and appointed his uncle in New York City as his guardian. When his lawyer told him they needed to meet in a hurry, he said he took the day off from his job at a supermarket and they filled out a new application for asylum. He described feeling “grateful” they were able to complete it on time.
