Judge blasts Trump team’s ‘startling’ attempt to rapidly deport immigrants: ‘Violates due process’
A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s administration from rapidly deporting immigrants by using a fast-tracked removal process central to the president’s mass deportation agenda.
The “expedited removal” process applies to undocumented immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the country longer than two years — historically, that meant people illegally crossing the southern border.
But the Trump administration expanded that process nationwide. Immigration court judges have been ordered to swiftly dismiss immigrants’ cases, generating scenes of masked federal agents patrolling courthouse hallways and hauling immigrants away the moment they leave their hearings or their court-ordered check-in appointments.
District Judge Jia M. Cobb in Washington, D.C., argued that the administration risks wrongfully removing people and violating due process rights for people who have “long since entered” the country.
“That means that they have a weighty liberty interest in remaining here and therefore must be afforded due process under the Fifth Amendment,” wrote Cobb, who was appointed by Joe Biden. “Prioritizing speed over all else will inevitably lead the government to erroneously remove people via this truncated process.”
Once those people are wrongfully removed, “it is largely too late to correct the error,” she wrote.
“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 added.
If that was the case, “everyone would be at risk,” she argued.
“The government could accuse you of entering unlawfully, relegate you to a bare-bones proceeding where it would ‘prove’ your unlawful entry, and then immediately remove you,” she explained. “By merely accusing you of entering unlawfully, the government would deprive you of any meaningful opportunity to disprove its allegations. Fortunately, that is not the law.”
The administration’s actions to strip legal status from immigrants who are in the middle of their court cases have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people to add to the president’s demands for mass deportations.
Under a previous policy that the Trump administration has since disbanded, federal agents were barred from making courthouse arrests in an effort to prevent a “palpable fear that disincentivizes people from appearing for their hearings,” according to a recent class-action lawsuit.
“But in the first few days of the Trump administration, defendants repealed those policies, exposing individuals who properly appear for their hearings, including to seek asylum and other relief, to the imminent threat of arrest and indefinite detention,” the lawsuit stated.
A federal judge in New York last month condemned the Trump administration’s “arbitrary” practice of arresting immigrants as they leave their court hearings, which has created what he calls a “game of detention roulette” that violates due process.
Nearly 200,000 people have been removed from the country since Trump took office, according to federal data. That pace of arrests and removals puts the Department of Homeland Security on track for its highest number of removals in a decade.
More than 60,000 people are detained in immigration detention centers across the country.
Cobb’s order could significantly slow the pace of those efforts, targeting what has become a pillar of the Trump administration’s “de-legalization” campaign.
“The Trump administration’s expansion of fast-track deportations has subjected thousands of people to an unfair, arbitrary, and error-prone system,” according to the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project senior staff attorney Anand Balakrishnan, lead counsel in the lawsuit in Cobb’s court.
“The court’s decision reaffirms the fundamental principle that people receive due process when the government seeks to deport them or their families,” Balakrishnan added.
