Washington, D.C. — Today, immigration legal service providers and advocacy organizations filed a federal lawsuit challenging a new interim final rule that allows U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to send people seeking asylum directly to immigration court without first assessing their legal claims in an affirmative asylum interview.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS), and Human Rights First on behalf of Immigration Equality, Oasis Legal Services, HIAS, and the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project. The organizational plaintiffs represent thousands of people with affirmative asylum applications pending before USCIS.
The new rule allows asylum officers to refer cases to immigration court for deportation proceedings, based only on their written application, without ever speaking to the asylum seeker about the persecution they fled. The rule took effect July 28, 2026 and applies to new and pending applications.
For decades, the affirmative asylum process has given people an opportunity to explain their asylum claims and answer questions in a non-adversarial interview with a trained asylum officer. The asylum officer has then decided whether to grant the application or refer it to immigration court, where the applicant must defend themself against deportation. The new rule allows USCIS to eliminate the interview entirely.
This rule further restricts access to asylum in the United States and is a massive and unlawful departure from established procedures that many asylum seekers had relied on when they filed their applications. It was published without advance notice or a meaningful opportunity for public comment.
The government estimates that up to 31 percent of the more than 1.4 million cases in the affirmative asylum system may be impacted by this rule. The consequences will be severe for people who have survived violence and trauma, many of whom have been waiting years for an interview. Sending them directly to deportation proceedings will increase the case backlog in the already overburdened immigration court system, where the Trump administration has made it clear immigration judges should deny even the strongest asylum applications before the applicants can submit evidence. As a result of this rule, many more people will be detained and ordered deported to places they fear persecution and torture without the opportunity to have their evidence considered by a neutral decisionmaker.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the interim final rule procedurally invalid and vacate the rule in its entirety.
Co-counsel and organizational plaintiffs in the case provided the following statements:
“With this rule, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to erode asylum seekers’ rights,” said Mary Georgevich, senior litigation attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “This rule eliminates the right to an interview, which is a critical part of the asylum application process for millions of people. Instead, based on incomplete information, DHS will refer cases to immigration court, increasing the likelihood that eligible refugees will be denied asylum and deported to persecution or torture.”
“This rule is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to accelerate deportations at the expense of due process,” said Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS). “After adopting numerous measures to stack the deck against people in deportation proceedings, they now seek to funnel more asylum cases into our broken immigration court system. At every step, their goal is to deprive people seeking protection of the opportunity to tell their stories and have their claims adjudicated fairly. In cases with life-or-death stakes, the consequences will be devastating.”
“This Interim Final Rule is part of a multi-layered attack on the U.S. asylum system. The Asylum Office was established as an institution in the early 1990’s to provide asylum seekers coming forward of their own volition to request protection with the opportunity to have their cases adjudicated in a non-adversarial setting by officers with specialized training in the field,” said Anwen Hughes, senior director of legal strategy, refugee programs, at Human Rights First (HRF). “Many people, including children, survivors of torture and trauma and of various forms of gender-based harm, speakers of rare languages, and people with cognitive challenges, among many others, have applied with the expectation that they will be able to explain their experiences and fears of persecution in an interview to an officer whose only job is to elicit and understand the relevant facts. Now, this rule would allow asylum officers to forward broad categories of cases into removal proceedings without interview. Before the immigration courts, as those are currently operating, many of these people may never get a hearing at all. This rule must be invalidated and the right to seek asylum in a fair process must be protected.”
“An asylum application can tell the government what happened to a survivor, but an interview helps the government understand the context, meaning, and severity of what happened. It is a safeguard against cultural misunderstandings, assumptions, and bias that can distort the written record. We do not all read the same words and reach the same understanding; why would we expect a written application to capture an entire human story? Meaningful protection requires us to listen before we judge. We have the means to process asylum claims without sacrificing lives for expediency,” said Adam Ryan Chang, executive director of Oasis Legal Services.
“Every asylum seeker who chooses to come forward and ask for safety in the United States is entitled by law to a full and fair interview at the asylum office. This is an essential right for LGBTQ people fleeing persecution,” said Aaron C. Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality. “This rule attempts to take that critical opportunity away and undermines the due process that asylum seekers are entitled to. The rule is illegal and must be struck down.”
“U.S. law gives every individual who is seeking safety the right to tell their story and explain the dangers they faced in their home countries and why it would be unsafe for them to return,” said Beth Oppenheim, president & CEO of HIAS. “The asylum interview is at times the only way ordinary people fleeing persecution have to be heard – to feel that their stories matter. But this rule will deny many people their voice and their due process, and the result will be devastating. People fleeing violence and persecution must be able to find safety, and this country must be able to treat them with respect, compassion, and dignity.”
“This rule is the latest in a series of attacks by this administration on the rights of people seeking protection in the United States, including children,” said Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project. “By eliminating the right to an asylum interview, this rule needlessly forces potentially hundreds of thousands of people into the overburdened, broken immigration court system, subjecting survivors of trauma, including children, to re-traumatizing proceedings, instead of allowing them to share their experience with a trained asylum officer in a less adversarial setting. This rule puts child survivors of trauma at increased risk of immigration detention and deportation back to the very conditions of danger that they fled. The stakes for immigrant children and all asylum seekers could literally be life or death.”
A copy of the complaint is available here.