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A federal judge on Friday blocked a Trump administration effort to expand fast-track deportations throughout the U.S. under a process known as expedited removal, indicating that officials are trampling on migrants’ due process through the policy’s expansion.
While it will almost certainly be appealed, Friday’s order is a major setback for the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, including its campaign to arrest asylum-seekers at immigration courthouses across the U.S. — an operation that has relied on the expansion of expedited removal.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb paused a January directive that had expanded the expedited removal policy — long limited to border areas and recent arrivals — to anywhere in the country and to those who arrived in the past two years.
Expedited removal allows federal immigration officials to quickly deport certain migrants, without allowing them to see an immigration judge, unless they claim asylum and pass an interview with a U.S. asylum officer. Before President Trump took office for a second time, the fast-track deportations only applied to unauthorized migrants apprehended within 100 miles of an international border and who had been in the U.S. for less than two weeks.
Cobb said the pro-immigrant advocates who challenged the legality of the nationwide expansion of expedited removal had made a “strong showing” that the effort “violates the due process rights of those it affects.”
“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,” Cobb wrote in her opinion. “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 indefinitely postponed the January expansion of expedited removal, and guidance issued to implement it.
Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday’s order.
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