The Biden administration last fall suspended the use of a draconian policy by the previous administration expanding the fast-tracked deportation of immigrants. Expedited removal allows individual mass deportation agents to bypass the U.S. immigration courts entirely, stomping on the due process rights of immigrants, as well as endangering brown and Black people who have legal status but can’t immediately prove it.
The Biden administration’s suspension was the right move. It’s now going further, by rescinding the previous administration’s expansion, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced.
“After a very long wait, cause for celebration today as the Biden administration finally rescinds the Trump administration's 2019 expansion of ‘expedited removal’—a summary deportation technique that thumbs its nose at due process,” tweeted Omar C. Jadwat, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. The organization had been among a coalition challenging the expansion in court.
“Prior to the rule, expedited removal was limited to a 100-mile zone from the border; to those who arrived by sea; and to those who had been in the U.S. for 14 days or fewer,” they said in litigation at the time. “Hundreds of thousands of people living anywhere in the U.S. are at risk of being separated from their families and expelled from the country without any recourse.”
“One of the major problems with expedited removal is that the immigration officer making the decision virtually has unchecked authority,” American Immigration Council said at the time, noting the deportation agent serves both as prosecutor and judge. There is no day in immigration court, as unfair as that immigration court system can be. “Moreover, individuals who otherwise might qualify for deportation relief if they could defend themselves in immigration court are unjustly deprived of any opportunity to do so.”
The prior administration’s expansion had been blocked by federal judge and historic Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson that fall, who ruled groups that had sued the prior administration “were likely to prevail in ongoing litigation and show irreparable harm being suffered by those they represent, including many legal immigrants and asylum seekers who could be swept up and expelled from the country without legal recourse,” The Washington Post reported at the time. But in a devastating loss for due process rights, a district court lifted that injunction.
Jadwat called the recent rescission “a welcome and important development because it takes a dangerous and unfair technique off the table, inside the U.S.” National Immigration Law Center said the expanded policy “promoted racial profiling & eviscerated due process. This was the right thing to do.”
”But expedited removal is still in effect at the border,” Jadwat continued. “Astonishingly, the Biden administration has elected to largely bypass even these summary, fast-track deportations by repeatedly extending Title 42, which gives people no chance to make their case at all.” Experts and advocates have continued to call for that policy’s termination.
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