The Trump administration faces a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday for a new Department of Homeland Security policy that immigrant advocacy groups say will expand “fast-track deportations” and deny them due process. The American Civil Liberties Union, joined by Make the Road New York, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and asked a federal judge to declare the policy unconstitutional, vacate it and block any similar effort, Courthouse News reports. The policy, which went into effect Tuesday evening, reinstates a 2019 notice that aimed to empower the department to deport undocumented immigrants who cannot prove they have been within the United States for two years or longer and are within 100 miles of the border. Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel in the case, decried the move, saying it would unconstitutionally separate and expel people across the country without providing them any legal recourse. “The Trump administration wants to use this illegal policy to fuel its mass deportation agenda and rip communities apart,“ Balakrishnan said in a statement. “Expanding expedited removal would give Trump a cheat code to circumvent due process and the Constitution, and we are here to fight it.”
According to the ACLU, the expedited removal process allows an immigration officer to determine whether a migrant is “inadmissible” if they lack the proper entry documents and order, and with a supervisor’s approval, to remove an individual without a hearing. Once an officer makes that determination, removal can occur within 24 hours. "Defendants are aware of the flaws in the expedited removal and credible fear processes, including the lack of procedural protections. Nevertheless, Defendants have acted to expand a systematically deficient process to an even larger category of individuals, without taking steps to address these well-documented problems," the ACLU and Make the Road say in their suit. Only in cases where the individual claims asylum and shows they have reason to fear removal to their country of origin does additional screening become available, but those screenings are much less formal than an official removal proceeding before an immigration judge. The 2019 notice was similarly challenged in federal court, where now-Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily blocked the rule before a D.C. Circuit panel reversed and vacated the injunction in 2020. Following the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic and former President Joe Biden’s executive order in February 2021 ordering a review of the 2019 notice, the rule was ultimately rescinded in March 2022. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that anyone residing within the United States, including undocumented immigrants, are recognized as “persons” guaranteed due process of the law under the Fifth and 14th Amendments.
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