A federal judge has ordered an immediate halt to the Trump administration's expansion of the rapid deportation program in the United States. The judge found that extending the program, a pillar of the administration's mass expulsion policy, creates a"significant risk" that immigrants who may be eligible to remain in the country will be summarily expelled without a proper hearing.
In her decision, published Friday night, Judge Jia Cobb, appointed to her position by Democratic President Joe Biden, granted a request from an immigrant rights group to suspend two procedures in place since the Republican administration took office in January and which have put millions of people at risk of rapid deportation.
For decades, the expedited deportation process applied only to undocumented immigrants apprehended within 100 miles of the border and who had been in the country for less than two weeks. But in 2019, the first Trump administration expanded the process to include anyone in an undocumented situation who couldn't prove they had entered the country more than two years earlier, regardless of where they were in the United States.
During his term, Biden rescinded the measure, but upon his return to the White House in January, Trump reinstated it. His administration believes that the right to a fair trial, guaranteed in Article 5 of the Constitution, does not apply to undocumented immigrants. That article stipulates:"No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
Judge Cobb—the same judge who, hours earlier, was examining Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook's lawsuit against Trump's attempts to fire her—deems it"shocking" that the government could hold that foreigners who have lived in the United States for years have no right to go to court and no option to avoid deportation other than those approved by Congress."If that were the case, not only non-citizens, but everyone would be at risk," the judge writes in her 48-page opinion.
“When it exponentially expanded the number of people who could be subject to this procedure, the government failed to adapt it to this new group of people,” the judge writes. And, when it comes to “people living far from the border, prioritizing speed over any other factor will inevitably lead the government to erroneously deport people through this flawed process.”
In fact, there have already been reports of wrongful deportations. Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego is currently engaged in a legal battle to be allowed to remain in the United States, where he resides with his wife and children (all of whom are US citizens) after being mistakenly deported to El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting his return due to fears of violent retaliation. A judge forced the US government to bring him back, but the administration has accused him of human trafficking and is threatening to deport him again, this time to Uganda, if he does not plead guilty to those charges, according to his lawyers.
Cobb also attacks the practice the government has begun implementing, whereby immigrants are detained and subjected to expedited removal proceedings when they attend regular hearings on their cases. This tactic, the judge states, highlights the need to immediately block the procedure.
Earlier this month, this same judge had already halted the application of rapid deportations to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had been able to remain legally in the country for years under parole programs, waiting for their cases to be heard in immigration courts.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security criticized Cobb's ruling. The judge's decision, argued the representative of the agency headed by Kristi Noem, disregards the legal authority of the US president. Trump, who upon returning to the White House promised to expel at least one million illegal immigrants from the country and who has strengthened the ranks of ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, to unprecedented levels,"has a mandate to detain and deport the worst of the worst," the spokesperson asserted.
But just hours earlier, another court also struck a blow to the Trump administration's wound. An appeals court provisionally halted the elimination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans. This program protects more than half a million South Americans from deportation and is one of the protections the Republican president has sought to eliminate since January.
