Judge Blocks Trump Admin’s Expansion of Fast-Track Deportations

A federal judge has halted the Trump administration’s attempt to expand fast-track deportations across the United States, ruling that the policy violated illegal immigrants’ constitutional rights to due process.

In an Aug. 29 decision, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb temporarily blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) January order authorizing “expedited removal” for illegal immigrants arrested anywhere in the country who cannot prove two years of continuous residence.

Cobb’s ruling pauses both the Jan. 21 DHS designation expanding expedited removal nationwide and the Jan. 23 guidance implementing it—known as the Huffman Memorandum—while the case proceeds.

She said the administration’s policy risks sweeping up people who have lived in the country long enough to deserve full hearings before deportation. Unlike new border crossers, Cobb wrote, such individuals “have a weighty liberty interest in remaining here and therefore must be afforded due process.”

Under expedited removal, Cobb noted, immigration officers, rather than immigration judges, can order deportations within days, often after a single interview and with little chance to gather evidence, consult counsel, or appeal. That stripped-down process may be efficient at the border but is dangerously inadequate when applied to people with established ties in the interior, she said.

“In defending this skimpy process, the Government makes a truly startling argument: that those who entered the country illegally are entitled to no process under the Fifth Amendment, but instead must accept whatever grace Congress affords them,” she wrote. “Were that right, not only noncitizens, but everyone would be at risk.”

The Department of Homeland Security criticized the ruling, saying it undermined the president’s constitutional authority to control immigration.

“This activist judge’s ruling ignores the President’s clear authorities under both Article II of the Constitution and the plain language of federal law,” a DHS official told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “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.”

While Cobb’s order blocks DHS’s designation and guidance implementing the expansion, it leaves intact the long-standing use of expedited removal at ports of entry, at sea, and within 100 miles of the border for those apprehended within 14 days of entry.

The lawsuit was filed in January by advocacy group Make the Road New York, which was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and its affiliates, who stated that the rule was unconstitutional.

“Expanding expedited removal would give Trump a cheat code to circumvent due process and the Constitution, and we are again here to fight it,” Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a January statement.

In June, the groups moved to block the policy while the case played out, citing reports of ICE agents arresting immigrants at courthouses and shifting them into fast-track proceedings.

“People who are complying with their legal obligations are basically being ambushed by ICE at their court appointments,” Balakrishnan said at the time.

The Trump administration has argued that expedited removal is a necessary tool to swiftly deport people who entered the country unlawfully and to deter future illegal crossings. In their April motion to dismiss, they said that the Homeland Secretary has “sole and unreviewable discretion” to apply expedited removal nationwide to noncitizens who have entered illegally within the past two years. They also argued that the January designation was fully consistent with Congress’s mandate.

“The designation lawfully applies to aliens who crossed illegally, since they were not previously inspected,” Justice Department attorneys wrote. “To hold otherwise would reward such aliens for their illegal entry and significantly limit the operation of the expedited removal scheme.”