Lawsuit says Somali immigrants have been denied fair hearings

By Pooja SalhotraWednesday March 25, 2026

The vast majority of the 80,000 Somalis who live in Minnesota are American citizens or legal permanent residents.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Somali immigrants in Minnesota are being pushed through immigration court at breakneck speed under a Trump administration practice that shortens timelines and, lawyers say, undercuts the basic protections of due process, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

In the complaint, two Minnesota legal providers argue that the Justice Department has, since late January, funneled Somali nationals into a separate court docket and set hearings on minimal notice — a shift they say leaves attorneys scrambling to prepare and makes effective representation far harder. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Hines Immigration Law, a private firm in Roseville, Minn., and the Advocates for Human Rights, a nonprofit legal services provider based in Minneapolis, asked the court to immediately halt the policy, calling it unconstitutional.

“This is not about efficiency or docket management,” Kelsey Hines, who owns Hines Immigration Law, said in a statement. “This is an undeniably targeted policy that singles out one nationality, designed to rob them of the due process they are legally guaranteed and to strip their legal teams of the ability to adequately and ethically prepare their cases for hearing.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit lands amid stepped-up immigration enforcement activity in Minnesota, home to about 80,000 Somalis — the largest Somali population in the United States. Those operations have included what the legal groups describe as a focused effort on Somali nationals, a community President Trump has repeatedly criticized.

Starting in December, the Trump administration sent thousands of federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis area, saying the goal was to pursue fraud investigations that had touched a pocket of Minnesota Somalis.

Somalis have also been the target of harsh language from Mr. Trump. In December, he called Somalis “garbage,” adding that “we don’t want them in our country.” He has also repeatedly attacked Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who arrived in the United States as a refugee from Somalia, with racist remarks.

At the same time, the administration is trying to end deportation protections for more than 2,000 migrants from Somalia who have been allowed to live and work in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. On March 13, a federal judge blocked the administration’s attempt to terminate those protections, ruling after the government was not prepared to defend the change in court. The administration has appealed.

In Tuesday’s filing, the plaintiffs portrayed the accelerated court scheduling as an intensification of what they called the administration’s “hateful rhetoric.” The policy has not been confirmed to The New York Times by Trump administration officials, but several immigration attorneys have described a sudden wave of hearings being set specifically for Somali clients.

Ordinarily, immigration cases stretch on for years and unfold across multiple stages — including master calendar hearings that handle procedural matters and individual merits hearings where people present testimony and evidence supporting requests for relief. Merits hearings are typically set about a year ahead of time, the lawsuit said, allowing lawyers time to investigate, gather records and prepare witnesses.

Now, the plaintiffs said, individual hearings for Somalis that were previously slated for late 2026, 2027 or 2028 are being moved up with as little as one month’s notice. They also contended that the cases are being routed to a small group of immigration judges with higher-than-average removal rates.

Ms. Hines said in a statement that 97 percent of her Somali clients’ cases had been rapidly advanced under the policy. Even working 12-hour days, seven days a week, she said, she would still be 7,000 hours short of the time needed to prepare their cases.

The lawsuit cited the scale of the immigration court backlog, noting that out of about 3.3 million pending cases nationwide, roughly 3,200 involve Somali nationals, based on the latest figures from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data center at Syracuse University.

Pooja Salhotra covers breaking news across the United States.