A day after the Trump administration significantly expanded its authority to carry out rapid deportations as part of its crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to stop it.
The new policy, known as “expedited removal,” empowers immigration officials to expel people who entered the country illegally quickly and without involving a judge — even if they have been here for up to two years and are far from the border. Politics could pave the way for mass deportations.
In releasing the policy earlier this week, officials wrote that it would “improve national and public safety” and reduce government costs.
But ACLU lawyers, working on behalf of a New York immigration 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 expedite mass deportations violates the fundamental right of hundreds of thousands of people to a fair day in court,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. She called the action “cruel” and “extremist” and said it would “leave children without parents, families without their breadwinners, businesses without workers and immigrant communities in ruins.”
Officials at the federal Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The Expedited Removal Policy announced on Tuesday in a released statement is substantially similar to a similar policy implemented in the summer of 2019 during Trump's first term.
The ACLU and other groups promptly suedand the matter lay in court for months. When President Biden took office, he repealed the policy and the legal battle over it stalled.
Under the expedited deportation policy, the Department of Homeland Security sought to expand a deportation process that had been in place near the border for decades. This allowed immigration officials to deport people who had been in the United States for less than two weeks if they were apprehended within 100 miles of the border.
The Trump administration wanted to expand this to the entire country, extending the period from two weeks to two years.
Immigrant lawyers argued then, as now, that the move represented a “major departure” from “a consistent norm for centuries of providing all noncitizens in the United States with notice, access to counsel, an opportunity to prepare, and a contested hearing.” before they can be deported.
The new procedure means a border guard can stop someone and decide whether or not to deport them in less than an hour.
“This is less of a process that people experience when they get a traffic ticket and with far greater consequences,” said Anand Balakrishnan, an attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and lead counsel in the case.
And often, he said, agents make mistakes.
“Those are sort of the reasons why no other government has expanded it in this way,” he said. “It creates a completely irresponsible system of one-sided authority in the hands of individual officials to make incredibly important decisions.”