The Trump administration has stripped protections from unaccompanied migrant children and undocumented minors to fast-track deportations, a new lawsuit challenging the administration argues. The administration’s policies have created harrowing scenes in courts across the country, where an increasing number of kids appear before judges without a lawyer or the legal support necessary to navigate a complex legal system that will determine their future.

One legal organization that is part of the suit described representing a child with a documented heart condition who applied for asylum based on her experiences of sexual abuse in her home country. She was forced into a hours-long virtual asylum interview one day after being hospitalized for a cardiac event. She requested to end the interview because she was experiencing pain in her chest, visibly crying and clutching her heart. The asylum officer insisted she continue; only after hours of subjecting this child to severe distress did the officer agree to reschedule.

In the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Maryland on October 15, a coalition of immigration advocates and legal aid providers say the administration has ignored federal law to create a “deportation assembly line” for unaccompanied children and undocumented minors.

The number of unaccompanied minors removed from the U.S. has more than tripled compared to President Trump’s first term, according to ProPublica. Children who have parents or sponsors in the U.S. have been separated from them and denied due process within Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) byzantine system of detention centers and jails, the lawsuit argues.

In some cases, children who crossed the border to seek asylum and, in many cases, to be reunited with family in the United States, could potentially be deported back to the dangerous conditions they attempted to flee, according to Cristel Martinez, an immigration attorney in Chicago.

“It’s basically sending the kids back to countries where their life is in danger, and may end up getting killed,” Martizen told reporters on October 15.

Martinez is herself an immigrant, and her law office has represented more than 400 unaccompanied minors in immigration court. That job has become increasingly difficult under a series of policy changes made by the Trump administration to fast-track deportations and cut off federal funding for nonprofits that provide legal support established by Congress for unaccompanied children. Attorneys previously had months to gather documents, perform psychological evaluations, and prepare a case. Now judges are setting asylum hearings and issuing removal orders at a speed never seen before.

Mickey Donovan-Kaloust, a director of children’s representation at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she has worked with undocumented children for 15 years but has never witnessed the “chaos, cruelty, and disregard for due process that I’m seeing today.”

“The government is stopping at nothing to fast-track the deportations of these children,” Donovan-Kaloust told reporters on Friday. “Instead of promptly releasing children to their family members as the law requires, the government has been trapping children in government custody for months on end.”

Minimum standards for caring for unaccompanied migrant children were not established until the Flores Settlement of 1997, a consent decree resulting from years of litigation filed by human rights groups. Then, until the early 2000s, children who arrived at a U.S. border without a parent or guardian were often detained indefinitely in a prison system designed for adults and could not meet basic childhood needs such as education.

Pushing for a bill to reform these practices in 2008, Sen. Dianne Feinstein described witnessing a 15-year-old girl appear “shackled and in prison clothing” at an asylum hearing ostensibly about her seeking safety in the U.S.

“As she told her story to an immigration judge, she could not wipe away her tears because her hands were chained to her waist,” Feinstein said at the time.

A series of legal challenges in the 1980s and 1990s began to set new standards for unaccompanied children, culminating in provisions included in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA), and later in the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA). Congress proposed these laws to help children fleeing violence and exploitation find safety in the U.S., the plaintiffs say.

“Together, the HSA, the TVPRA, and their implementing regulations try to account for the vulnerability of a child navigating a foreign immigration system alone — without a parent, without a lawyer, and frequently without English fluency,” the new lawsuit reads.

The laws established child-appropriate procedures for unaccompanied children, such as “affirmative” asylum interviews with specially trained officers, so that kids are not forced to recount the most traumatizing moments of their lives before an immigration judge.

However, the Trump administration is now violating these laws by denying migrant children due process rights and fast-tracking their removal from the country, according to the lawsuit.

“They are making it impossible for children to get competent representation, and they are accessible to the government [for maximizing deportations] because they are in their custody,” Beth Baltimore, interim managing director of legal services at The Door, a youth center in New York City, told Truthout. “It’s a very coordinated attack on children.”

Today, all unaccompanied minors apprehended by federal immigration police must be handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). ORR is not an enforcement agency and operates shelters where parents and potential sponsors can be screened to become caregivers for the children.

However, advocates for immigrants rights say the Trump administration is now rushing these same children — and others taken during chaotic ICE raids and separated from parents — through the legal proceedings in ways that deny them due process and put them in danger. ORR and other agencies under the Department of Homeland Security tasked with protecting their rights are instead dismantling them, according to the lawsuit.

“I’ve been in immigration court observing as well for the past few weeks, have seen firsthand kids getting removed, even when attorneys from the organization that is supposed to be helping them are present and not speaking up for the kids,” Martinez said.

The lawsuit specifically challenges two new policies that attorneys say have eroded due process, including requiring children to apply for asylum within weeks of entry and providing as little as one day’s notice before an asylum interview, which establishes whether they qualify as a refugee fleeing danger. The administration abruptly changed the asylum interview format and instructed judges to complete their detained child docket by January 2027 regardless of circumstance. This has left attorneys little time to prepare cases as children are mandated to appear in court multiple times a week.

Baltimore said many children arrive at the border unaccompanied but are trying to reunite with family in the U.S. The fear created by Trump’s violent mass deportation scheme has made this impossible for many families.

“Some of them, they are not unaccompanied. They are living with families, but because of an ICE detention on the street or criminal arrest where they are sent to ICE or ORR, they become ‘unaccompanied children,’” Baltimore said. “They are being placed into ORR custody and then there are these huge barriers for release, but they are already living with families and it was fine; there are no allegations of abuse or neglect with those parents.”

As Democrats in Congress have pointed out, federal law also requires special protections for suspected child victims of human trafficking, but the administration appears to be circumventing these rules to increase deportations.

Additionally, ORR is supposed to provide children with legal services, and traditionally did so by paying nonprofit legal aid providers. However, after a dispute with a nonprofit in which the Trump administration demanded sensitive personal information about defendants, the federal government let the contracts lapse on July 31, potentially leaving an estimated 26,000 children and teens without paid legal representation. Advocacy groups are digging into reserve funding to pay attorneys and are also challenging this in federal court.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Donovan-Kaloust described another recent case.

“Last week, a 5-year-old child who had been abandoned by his family was ordered deported in a docket where [our organization] was present,” she said. “A five-year-old. That should stop this country in its tracks.”

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