A Push to Accelerate Kids’ Asylum Cases Will Hasten Deportations, Attorneys Fear

Immigrant children who crossed the border into the United States without their parents are facing a barrage of changes that could increase their odds of being deported.

President Donald Trump’s administration has begun rapidly scheduling large numbers of asylum interviews for unaccompanied children, lawyers representing them told New York Focus, leaving kids and their attorneys with little time to prepare for sessions in which they could win the right to stay in the United States. For some legal organizations, what’s normally a trickle of perhaps one interview per month has turned into a deluge of dozens.

Interviews take place after asylum seekers submit a written application; they can sometimes take years to schedule. Over several hours, officers with US Citizenship and Immigration Services try to tease out whether immigrants faced any of the specific types of persecution in their home countries that would qualify them for the protected status. If successful, applicants are protected from deportation and can soon apply for permanent residency. If not, the only remaining path to asylum runs through an immigration court system that has become increasingly hostile to it.

The Trump administration also issued a new rule this week that will allow asylum officers to send claims straight to immigration court without conducting that initial interview. It applies to children as well as adults, and its effects remain to be seen.

Meanwhile, the administration has refused to pay out a contract that funds legal providers to represent unaccompanied kids — and the contract is set to expire Friday, raising the prospect of more children having to navigate deportation proceedings alone.

All told, children and teenagers in New York and across the country are facing a much quicker path to potential deportation.

“It really does seem to be a targeted push against unaccompanied children to speed up their removal proceedings in any way possible,” said Rachel Jordan, managing attorney at the nonprofit Safe Passage Project, which serves immigrant and refugee kids.

For clients of the Safe Passage Project, USCIS scheduled about 30 interviews between late July and August, compared to four or five total from 2024 through earlier this year, Jordan said.

Emily Norman, East Coast regional director for Kids in Need of Defense, said her organization had recently received notice that the government scheduled more than 50 asylum interviews for clients in the New York City area for August and September. In the past, she said, the organization saw fewer than one interview a month. A large volume of asylum interviews have also been scheduled soon for clients in Houston, Newark, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, Norman said.

And at The Door, a New York City-based nonprofit that represents immigrant kids, staff have gone from preparing for one or two asylum cases every six months to three or four per month, said Meena Shah, managing director of legal services.

USCIS did not answer questions about the flurry of scheduled interviews. “Making official decisions on asylum applications filed by Unaccompanied Alien Children is part of the agency’s overall backlog reduction strategy,” the agency said in a statement.

Typically, attorneys said, they prepare for their clients’ interviews by consulting experts on conditions in their home countries. They may spend hours conducting practice interviews with an interpreter to get their clients comfortable with the format. Asylum officers often ask detailed questions in an effort to draw out a child or teenager’s account of persecution, but also to find inconsistencies or evolving explanations. The officer may probe for the details of a harmful experience a child claims to have had, or ask the same question in multiple ways.

“Sometimes you can get officers who start to ask, ‘Why can’t you tell me this?’ — really pushing the kid,” Norman said. “An attorney can step in and say, ‘Stop. You need to give the child a moment. They are confused.’”

While giving lawyers less time to prepare their clients for interviews, the Trump administration has also withheld funding for their work. 

No one in immigration proceedings is guaranteed an attorney, but under federal law, the government is supposed to ensure that children who cross the border alone have access to counsel to the “greatest extent practicable.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which takes custody of unaccompanied children when they arrive in the United States, provides nonprofits with hundreds of millions of dollars annually to pay for legal services.

That funding has lingered in uncertainty for months. In early 2025, the Trump administration canceled the contract for legal services, prompting some organizations to lay off staff. A federal judge ordered the administration to reinstate the contract but, earlier this year, HHS said in court filings that its Office of Refugee Resettlement had identified issues with invoices and demanded additional documentation before paying it out.

Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that administers the contract and passes money to providers, said it couldn’t retroactively create that documentation. HHS has refused to pay and owes $65 million for legal services so far, according to Acacia. A lawsuit over the lack of payment is ongoing.

The contract is set to expire after July 31. In a statement, the Office of Refugee Resettlement said it had proposed extending it, but that Acacia had been unwilling to agree to provide certain information about clients. Acacia counters that the information the government is demanding would compromise clients’ confidentiality, at the same time that ORR has been sharing information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The federal government has not announced what will happen with the contract after this week.

The end of the contract means that New York’s legal aid organizations will face difficult decisions. State and local funding that also helps pay for attorneys for some children will continue, but the organizations may be unable to take on new clients. Shah said that lawyers should still be able to visit their existing clients at federally contracted shelters, but won’t be able to conduct legal trainings after Friday, leaving kids who arrive after that date potentially cut off from attorneys.

“That’s going to be a class of kids that could be subjected to abuse, harm, neglect in these facilities with nobody there that’s independent of these systems to talk to them,” Shah said.

If USCIS doesn’t grant a child asylum following their interview, they still have a chance to win it from an immigration judge. But that process has become its own assembly line, as judges have been speeding up court proceedings for minors.

On Tuesday, New York City-based Immigration Judge Lisa Ling conducted a hearing for 41 unaccompanied children in federal custody, including a 3-year-old for whom attorneys were trying to put together an asylum application. Ling sat at the dais in her courtroom, while the children, their advocates, a Department of Homeland Security lawyer, and a Spanish interpreter appeared on a screen behind her. The respondents, most of whom were teenagers, sat in front of web cameras in offices and conference rooms at their shelters, sometimes alone and other times shoulder to shoulder with another teen.

Until recently, it was common for judges in these kinds of hearings to offer children months to prepare their cases. For more than 30 of the kids, Ling set new hearing dates within three weeks, telling those without attorneys to use the time to find representation.

She asked a boy named Benjamin, who looked around 16 years old, if he had completed an asylum application she told him to submit by that day.

“I still haven’t done it because I haven’t found an attorney yet,” he said in Spanish, with an interpreter translating for the judge.

“With or without an attorney, you have to fill it out,” she told him, adding that it had to be written in English. If it wasn’t completed by the date of his next hearing, which she set for August 18, it wouldn’t be considered.

Many of the kids appearing before Ling had already submitted applications for asylum with USCIS. In the past, immigration judges often terminated or paused deportation proceedings, effectively stopping the court process while they waited for their interviews. No longer.

“The court does not terminate proceedings, as stated at the last hearing,” Ling told the advocate for a child who had recently applied for asylum. She scheduled a new hearing for mid-August.

The approach means Ling can close cases more quickly. Of 133 minors’ cases she resolved between January and June, she ordered deportation more than 60 percent of the time, up from 45 percent in 2024. Facing narrowing options for deportation protection and growing hurdles to reuniting with their family members in the US, another 10 percent of the kids chose to leave the country voluntarily, up from less than 1 percent in 2024.

A spokesperson for the immigration court system said the courts “prioritize the timely completion of all cases, including those of unaccompanied alien children, and make scheduling adjustments as needed to ensure cases do not languish.” 

Most of the kids appearing before Ling had no attorney, and it was unclear whether they had received any one-on-one legal counsel. Just under 40 percent of minors in immigration proceedings in New York lack an attorney, compared to 56 percent nationally, said Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice.

A boy named Edgar, who looked to be in his early teens, had black hair that flopped across his forehead and wore a blue T-shirt as he sat in front of a camera at the shelter where he was staying. Ling asked him if he was afraid of returning to Guatemala. No, he told her. She asked him if there was anything or anyone that he was afraid of there. 

“No, I don’t have anyone that I fear,” he answered in Spanish through an interpreter, not seeming to realize that, as he shared more about his hopes and motivations, his chances of staying in the United States were dwindling. “I just always wanted to be in this country since I was little, and now that I’m here, I don’t want to leave.”

Later, she asked again: Had he been fleeing anyone or anything when he left Guatemala? No, he responded. 

“Here, maybe I can go to school, and back home there was very little work,” he said. 

“Edgar, I’m sorry, but it does not appear that you are eligible for any relief but voluntary departure,” Ling told him, referencing a process by which he’d have to leave the US of his own accord. The boy was still. He asked what would happen if he did not accept. Ling explained she would then order him deported.

“So do you want voluntary departure?” she asked.

He looked down at his hands. “Voluntary departure,” he answered quietly.