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.
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 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 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.”
