A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume carrying out speedy deportations of undocumented migrants throughout the United States, not just near the border.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a lower court decision that temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s expanded use of expedited removal. The ruling was a big victory for the Republican administration, which views the expansion of so-called expedited removal as a key tool for carrying out its mass deportation policy.
Expedited removal — quick deportation without a chance to appear before a judge — has previously been applied to migrants arriving by sea or caught at or near the border shortly after crossing.
In January, Trump expanded its use to undocumented migrants all over the United States. Immigration agents began whisking migrants away from courthouses where they had gone for immigration proceedings and then removing them from the country within days.
“The Trump administration’s push for fast-track deportations will subject people to an unfair and error-prone system,” Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.
Balakrishnan represented plaintiffs in arguments before the appellate panel and said its ruling “undermines the fundamental principle that people receive due process when the government seeks to deport them.”
DC Circuit Judge Justin R. Walker, one of the judges on the panel, said the plaintiffs had not shown the expanded use of expedited removal violated due process rights. Immigrants received notice of removal proceedings and were given a chance to respond, he wrote in his opinion.
Walker and the second judge in the majority, Neomi Rao, were appointed by Trump. The third judge on the panel was appointed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
Walker said there was no requirement that the administration inform immigrants that they can avoid expedited removal if they can show they have been in the United States for more than two years.
"The constitutional requirement is notice of the action the government is taking and the grounds for it, plus an opportunity to respond," he wrote, adding that the plaintiffs' “contrary reasoning would require immigration officers to provide what amounts to legal advice.”
Walker and Rao vacated an order by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb that put the expanded use of expedited removal on hold. Cobb, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat, ruled in August that the administration had not developed procedures to ensure migrants were not wrongly deported under the expedited process.
The plaintiffs had put forward “substantial evidence" that the expedited removal process, on the contrary, carried a high risk of error when applied more broadly, Cobb said. The ruling cited examples of people who had lived in the U.S. for far longer than two years but were still ordered to be removed in expedited proceedings.
In his opinion, Walker acknowledged evidence of such errors, but said they resulted from “individual officers’ failure to follow the law — not defects in the written directives under review or the procedures they incorporate.”
The Trump administration has argued that its expansion of expedited removal includes protections to prevent arbitrary removal. In a court filing in October, Justice Department attorneys said Cobb's ruling was an “egregious error” that was depriving the administration of an “essential tool to combat the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration over the past few years” and efficiently deporting potentially millions of people.
