Immigration courts are accelerating hearing dates for the influx of unaccompanied Central American minors caught at the border.

According to The Associated Press, the court system has been criticized for being backlogged so much that some undocumented immigrants have ended up staying in the U.S. for months or years awaiting trial.

The Central American children have been pushed to the front of the line of 375,000 immigration cases. They will each get an initial court hearing within three weeks, the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review said. Neither the the number of hearings nor the name of the courts with new hearings have been disclosed.

In the past, immigration lawyers have supported an accelerated court system so that their clients can quicker learn their fate. When it comes to the minors, however, lawyers are concerned that they will not have enough time to prove their cases and grant them residence in the U.S.

"When the hearing date is three months out, it's no big deal -- it's plenty of time to get yourself a lawyer," Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney with the Legal Aid Justice Center in Falls Church, Virginia, said. "When it's three weeks, that's nowhere near enough time."

"It's just not efficient to go so fast that challenges can be made to the due process," Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks added. "It ends up making the cases take longer overall and results in longer appeals, so no one is happy."

In addition, some lawyers fear that the minors will not be properly notified of their court dates, miss it and thus be deported. Still, the new system began in Los Angeles and other courts this week.

Los Angeles Times reports that in a Los Angeles courtroom on Monday, none of the 37 children scheduled for hearings with Judge Ashley Tabaddor showed up. Most of the children were relocated in distant states, including Georgia, Louisiana and New York. Instead of issuing deportation orders, Tabaddor issued change-of-venue orders so the minors could appear at a different hearing in a court closer to them.

Kathryn Mattingly, an Executive Office for Immigrant Review spokeswoman, said she did not know why the hearings were scheduled so far away from the children's locations.

"It is not enough time to prepare a whole case," Vera Weisz, a Los Angeles attorney who said pro bono law firms have been flooded, said. "In the name of expediency, you're denying people due process."

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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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