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, she said, may be efficient at the border but is dangerously inadequate when applied to people with established ties in the interior.
“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 said in a 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.
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