A US judge blocked a Trump administration policy that for months has allowed federal agents to rapidly remove undocumented immigrants without due process from anywhere in the US if they can’t quickly prove they’ve been in the country for more than two years.
The decision Friday puts on hold a rule enacted in January that has become a key element of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort. The rule expanded a policy known as “expedited removal,” which had long been used only for immigrants caught near the US border and only if they’d been in the country for a few weeks or less.
The new policy allowed such removals to be carried out from anywhere in the US and to anyone who’s been in the country for less than two years. But the expedited-removal process has always left too much room for error, US District Judge Jia Cobb said in the ruling, including the rapid deportation of individuals who have legitimate reasons to remain in the US. Expanding the policy only allows room for more errors, possibly irreversible ones, she said.
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“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,” Cobb wrote. “By merely accusing you of entering unlawfully, the government would deprive you of any meaningful opportunity to disprove its allegations.”
Cobb called the government’s arguments “startling,” noting that it means undocumented immigrants “are entitled to no process under the Fifth Amendment, but instead must accept whatever grace Congress affords them.”
Another Setback
The decision is the latest setback for the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which has led to widespread fear among millions of migrants that they’ll be seized suddenly by masked agents and removed from the US with little recourse. In a separate case, a federal judge in Los Angeles blocked immigration officials from using racial profiling in their migrant sweeps in the region. The government has asked the US Supreme Court to pause that ruling.
In a statement on Cobb’s decision, the Department of Homeland Security said the ruling was issued by an “activist judge” and fails to acknowledge the president’s authority over immigration.
“The previous administration facilitated an invasion of our country at the southern border,” according to the statement. “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.”
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Cobb said in her ruling that Supreme Court precedent and the Constitution have long guaranteed that people in the US illegally who were not previously subject to the expedited removal policy have a right to meaningfully challenge their removal.
“The court therefore rejects the Government’s extraordinary request to treat as falling outside of the Constitution’s due process guarantee the millions of immigrants who, although they may have entered unlawfully, have established lives here and made this country home,” Cobb said.
The suit was filed Jan 22 by Brooklyn-based nonprofit Make the Road New York. It challenged Trump’s policy of allowing “low level immigration officers” to summarily deport non-citizens without providing them proper access to attorneys or a chance to gather evidence.
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“The administration’s decision to expand expedited removal to a vast group of non-citizens living anywhere in the United States disregards nearly three decades of experience showing that the expedited removal process, even when used at the border for new arrivals, is rife with errors and results in widespread violations of individuals’ legal rights,” the group said in the complaint.
