A federal judge on Friday stopped a Trump administration plan to expand fast-track deportations across the U.S., using a process called expedited removal. The judge said the policy’s expansion violates migrants’ rights to due process.
While the Trump administration will likely appeal, Friday’s decision is a major obstacle for its efforts to deport large numbers of people, including a plan to arrest asylum-seekers at immigration courthouses nationwide. This operation depends on the broader use of expedited removal.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb paused a January directive that had widened expedited removal. The policy, which had previously applied mostly to border areas and recent arrivals, was now set to apply anywhere in the country and to people who arrived in the past two years.
Expedited removal allows immigration officials to quickly deport certain migrants without letting them see an immigration judge—unless they claim asylum and pass an interview with a U.S. asylum officer. Before President Trump’s second term, fast-track deportations applied only to unauthorized migrants caught within 100 miles of a border and who had been in the U.S. less than two weeks.
Judge Cobb said the groups challenging the nationwide expansion made a “strong showing” that the policy “violates the due process rights of those it affects.”
She added, “In so holding, the Court does not cast doubt on the constitutionality of the expedited removal statute, nor on its longstanding application at the border. It merely holds that in applying the statute to a huge group of people living in the interior of the country who have not previously been subject to expedited removal, the Government must afford them due process. The procedures currently in place fall short.”
Cobb blocked the January expansion and the guidance that was issued to carry it out.
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that the ruling “ignores the President’s clear authorities under both Article II of the Constitution and the plain language of federal law.”
“DHS is exercising its full authority under federal law by placing illegal aliens who have been here for less than two years into expedited removal,” the department added. “President Trump has a mandate to arrest and deport the worst of the worst. We have the law, facts, and common sense on our side.”
