A day after the Trump administration moved to vastly expand its powers to carry out fast-track deportations as part of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued to try to stop it.
The new policy, known as “expedited removal,” empowers immigration officials to swiftly deport those who have entered the country illegally without going before a judge — even if they have been here for up to two years and are far from the border. The policy could pave the way for mass deportations.
In posting the policy earlier this week, officials wrote that it would “enhance national security and public safety” and reduce government costs.
But lawyers for the ACLU, working on behalf of a New York immigrant services organization called Make The Road New York, argued that the policy violates the due process clause of the 5th Amendment, as well as the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
“President Trump’s draconian decision to fast track mass deportations violates hundreds of thousands’ fundamental right to a fair day in court,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in a statement. She called the effort “cruel” and “extremist” and said it would “leave children without parents, families without their breadwinners, businesses without workers, and immigrant communities in shambles.”
Officials with the federal Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The expedited removal policy announced Tuesday in a posted notice substantially resembles a similar policy that was rolled out in the summer of 2019 during Trump’s first term.
The ACLU and other groups promptly sued, and the matter was tied up in court for months. When President Biden assumed office, he rescinded the policy, and the litigation over it stalled.
Under the expedited removal policy, the Department of Homeland Security sought to expand a removal process that had been in place near the border for decades. That allowed immigration officials to remove people who have been in the United States for less than two weeks if they were apprehended within 100 miles of the border.
The Trump administration sought to expand this across the country and to broaden the time period from two weeks to two years.
Then, as now, legal advocates for immigrants argued that the move was a “major departure” from “a consistent century-long norm of providing all noncitizens within the United States with notice, access to counsel, an opportunity to prepare and a contested hearing” before they can be deported.
The new process means that a border patrol agents could pull someone over and determine whether or not they should be deported in less than an hour.
“This is less process that people get when they get a traffic ticket and with far greater consequences,” said Anand Balakrishnan, an attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and lead counsel on the case.
And often, he said, agents make mistakes.
“These are sort of the reasons why no other administration has expanded it in this way,” he said. “It creates an entirely unaccountable system of unilateral authority in the hands of individual officers to make incredibly weighty choices.”
