Another lawsuit alleges DOJ is illegally rejecting telework requests from employees with disabilities

A group of employees with disabilities at the Executive Office of Immigration Review alleged in a lawsuit on June 3 that agency officials are categorically denying reasonable accommodation requests for telework following President Donald Trump’s directive in January 2025 mandating that federal staffers return to in-person work. 

While that order ended telework and remote work flexibility for most government workers, civil servants with qualifying disabilities are exempt from its requirements. Plus, agencies are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations (e.g. flexible schedules and accessible technology) to such employees unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship.” 

But staffers with disabilities alleged these rules have been flouted by officials at EOIR, a Justice Department agency that adjudicates immigration cases. 

“Since late April 2025, on information and belief, the agency has granted no telework reasonable accommodations to EOIR employees, including new requests for telework reasonable accommodations and requests to renew previously approved telework reasonable accommodations,” their attorneys wrote in the filing. 

One of the named plaintiffs, Kimberly Panian, said that during a May 2025 meeting to discuss her telework reasonable accommodation request an agency official told her that EOIR had not granted any such requests under the new administration. 

Panian, who has worked at the agency as an attorney-advisor since 2018, has Type I diabetes and experiences migraines with stroke-like symptoms. In March 2020, she requested a full-time telework accommodation due to fears that her diabetes could expose her to more severe COVID-19 complications. While that request was approved, all EOIR staffers shortly thereafter were directed to work from home due to the pandemic. 

“Ms. Panian also noted [in a 2022 accommodation renewal request] that when she has a migraine episode, she cannot manage her blood sugar, which puts her at considerable risk due to her diabetes,” according to the lawsuit. “Her request explained that she is better able to manage her symptoms from home and emphasized the danger of having a medical emergency at work due to the court’s lack of cell service and trained individuals to help her.” 

But her requests for telework have been denied since the policy change, and she was ordered to return to the office by April 20, 2026. Since that date, she has used nearly 250 hours of sick and annual leave and will run out by the middle of June. 

“In addition to skyrocketing blood sugar and increased migraines, Ms. Panian has been in a constant state of increased anxiety and has experienced numerous panic attacks and other mental health symptoms. Given her precarious health, the stress and anxiety create a domino effect that worsens her ability to manage her diabetes, migraines and related symptoms,” her lawyers wrote. “The medication and medical equipment on which Ms. Panian relies are incredibly expensive, and she lives in constant fear that she will have to jeopardize her life by returning to in-person work to protect her livelihood and health insurance.”

EOIR attorney-advisor Hoi Yee Baxter, the other named plaintiff, teleworked even before the COVID-19 pandemic but requested work from home as a reasonable accommodation after being diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in September 2024. That request was approved on Jan. 13, 2025. 

Ultimately, however, her accommodation was revoked about a year later, and she was directed to begin working in-person by Feb. 2, 2026. Like Panian, she has relied on leave since then and is set to run out in June. 

“[Baxter] has spent the time she would be working [instead] thinking about her lung cancer, stressing about losing her job and contemplating death,” according to the filing. “EOIR’s denial of her telework reasonable accommodation request has had a compounding and negative impact on her mental health. She experiences increased headaches, stress, and anxiety.”

Democracy Forward — a national legal organization that is behind many of the lawsuits against the Trump administration, which is representing the plaintiffs along with the employment law firm Burakiewicz & DePriest — argued that EOIR’s apparent telework policy violates the Rehabilitation Act’s prohibition on disability-based discrimination in federal programs. 

“The Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to engage in an individualized, good-faith process to provide reasonable accommodations — not impose blanket bans driven by politics and ideology,” said Elena Goldstein, Democracy Forward’s legal director, in a statement. “This policy of categorically denying telework accommodations is unlawful, dangerous and fundamentally inconsistent with the federal government’s obligations under disability rights law.”

In response to a request for comment, EOIR said that it “declines to comment on litigation-related matters.” 

The lawsuit cites an April 2025 EOIR email that said officials would take a “closer look” at telework reasonable accommodations because the component has “slightly more than 2% of all DOJ employees” but “is responsible for approximately 11% of all full-time telework reasonable accommodations granted department-wide.” 

A separate group of DOJ employees with disabilities alleged in a recent lawsuit that officials discriminated and retaliated against them “as part of a systematic, agency-wide practice of refusing to grant requests for telework as a reasonable accommodation.” And Government Executive previously reported that Terry Jackson, a former DOJ employee with disabilities, settled with the agency after alleging that he was fired for requesting telework as a reasonable accommodation. 

Many EOIR immigration judges have been removed since the start of Trump’s second term in what they allege are politically motivated mass firings.