Minneapolis (Somalia Today) – Two Minnesota-based legal providers have sued the Trump administration, accusing it of fast-tracking immigration court cases involving Somali nationals in a way they say denies them a fair hearing and heightens the risk of deportation.
Hines Immigration Law and the Advocates for Human Rights filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging what they describe as a policy in place since late January that singles out Somali immigrants for accelerated hearings.
The complaint alleges that the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) placed non-detained Somali immigrants on a separate national docket.
Under the policy described in the filing, a limited group of judges handles the cases, while officials bring both procedural and merits hearings forward on unusually compressed timelines.
Master calendar hearings have been scheduled with as little as one week’s notice, while individual merits hearings previously expected in late 2026, 2027, or even 2028 have, in some cases, been moved up to the next few months.
The legal groups argue that such scheduling leaves lawyers with little time to gather evidence, prepare testimony, and build asylum cases that would normally take months, and sometimes years, to prepare.
Kelsey Hines, whose Roseville-based firm represents many Somali asylum seekers, said the pace had overwhelmed her practice.
“Ninety-seven percent of my Somali clients’ cases have been rapidly advanced on impossible and unprecedented timelines,” Hines said in a statement. “Not a single non-Somali case has received this treatment.”
Targeted policy
The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the lawsuit and has not confirmed the existence of a formal Somali-only fast-track policy.
But the complaint alleges a clear pattern in court scheduling, judges’ remarks, and the experiences of immigration lawyers handling Somali cases.
It says the system has channelled many of the accelerated cases to a limited pool of immigration judges, some of whom sit outside the jurisdictions where the immigrants and their lawyers live.
According to the filing, those judges have often appeared remotely from other states, refused or limited requests for continuances, and, in some cases, recorded higher-than-average rates of removal.
Michele Garnett McKenzie, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Advocates for Human Rights, said the policy “manipulates the immigration court to deny a single nationality the right to seek asylum”.
She said US and international law protect the right to seek asylum, but argued that the scheduling policy strips Somali applicants of “a fair day in court”.
The complaint says about 3,200 pending immigration court cases nationwide involve Somali nationals, a small share of the more than 3.3 million active immigration cases in the system overall.
Minnesota feels the impact especially strongly because about 80,000 Somalis live there, forming the largest Somali community in the United States.
Refugees and other migrants fleeing civil war and instability in Somalia built that community over decades.
Broader crackdown
The lawsuit lands in a politically charged atmosphere following a wider immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security launched what it described as its largest immigration enforcement operation ever, deploying around 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area.
Officials linked the operation in part to fraud allegations involving a section of the Somali community.
State and local officials criticised the move at the time as politically driven and warned that it had spread fear across immigrant communities.
The plaintiffs in Tuesday’s case argue that the court scheduling policy should be seen in that broader context.
They point to repeated anti-Somali rhetoric from President Donald Trump and say the accelerated docket is not a neutral administrative effort to reduce backlogs, but part of a wider pattern of targeting Somali immigrants.
That argument comes as Somalis in the United States are already fighting on another legal front.
Earlier this month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals living and working in the United States under the programme.
Lawyers in that case argued that ending the protections would expose Somalis to serious danger if returned to a country still facing insecurity, political instability, and the long-running insurgency by Al-Shabaab.
The administration has appealed that ruling.
Backlog or bias
The new lawsuit is also likely to sharpen the debate over how the government is trying to tackle the huge immigration court backlog.
The administration is expected to argue that faster scheduling forms part of a broader effort to move cases through a system burdened by millions of pending matters.
But the plaintiffs say this is something different.
They argue that the government has singled out one nationality for accelerated treatment while leaving comparable non-Somali cases on their normal timetable.
For the legal groups, that amounts not only to poor court administration, but also to a denial of due process.
They are asking the federal court to halt the policy immediately, restore normal scheduling procedures, and bar the government from placing Somali cases on a separate track.
The outcome could have consequences beyond the Somali community.
If the court accepts the plaintiffs’ argument, it could limit how far immigration authorities can go in accelerating cases for specific nationalities under the banner of efficiency.
If it does not, the ruling could give the government more room to apply similar approaches to other immigrant groups.
For Somali families in Minnesota and beyond, however, the issue is more immediate.
At stake is whether asylum seekers and other immigrants who already face the uncertainty of removal proceedings can count on enough time to prepare a defence, gather supporting evidence, and appear before a judge on equal terms.
