A day after the Trump administration moved to significantly expand its powers to carry out expedited deportations as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to block it.
The new policy, known as “expedited removal,” gives immigration authorities the power to quickly deport illegal immigrants without going before a judge, even if they have been in the country for less than two years and are far from the border. Even if we are far apart. This policy could pave the way for mass deportations.
When announcing the policy earlier this week, officials wrote that it would “strengthen national security and public safety” and reduce government costs.
But ACLU lawyers representing a New York immigration services organization called Make the Road New York say the policy violates not only the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, but also the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. He also claimed that there was a violation. .
“President Trump’s draconian decision to expedite mass deportations deprives hundreds of thousands of people of their fundamental right to a fair day in court,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. It is an infringement.” She called the effort “cruel” and “extremist” and said it would “destroy orphaned children, families without breadwinners, businesses without workers and immigrant communities.”
Federal Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.
The expedited removal policy announced in a notice posted Tuesday is substantially similar to a similar policy introduced in the summer of 2019 during President Trump’s first term.
The ACLU and other groups immediately filed suit, and the issue remained in court for several months. President Biden rescinded the policy when he took office, and lawsuits over it stalled.
Under its expedited removal policy, the Department of Homeland Security sought to expand the removal process that has been in place for decades near the border. This allows immigration authorities to deport people who have been in the United States for less than two weeks if they are apprehended within 100 miles of the border.
The Trump administration sought to expand this nationwide and extend the period from two weeks to two years.
Immigration legal advocates then, as now, said the move marked “a century-long commitment to providing all noncitizens in the United States with notice, access to legal counsel, the opportunity to prepare, and the opportunity for a contested hearing.” It was a “major departure” from “consistent norms”. ” before they are deported.
The new process means border agents can pick up someone and decide within an hour whether they should deport them.
“This is less formality than what people go through when they get a traffic ticket, and it has far greater consequences,” said Anand Balakrishnan, an attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and lead attorney on the case. said.
And agents often make mistakes, he said.
“Those are kind of the reasons why no other administration has expanded like this,” he said. “It creates a system with no accountability at all, where unilateral power is placed in the hands of individual officers to make incredibly consequential choices.”
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