Legal experts warn the expedited removal expansion bypasses due process and puts citizens and long-term residents at risk
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest a fugitive in 2020. Photo via U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The Trump administration has revived a border security policy that legal experts say paves the way for mass deportations — without even a court hearing — and threatens to put Latino Arizonans, regardless of their citizenship status, at risk of racial profiling and removal from the country.
On Friday, the White House officially reinstated a
2019 policy greenlighting fast-tracked deportation proceedings for immigrants living anywhere in the United States who can’t prove more than two years of continuous presence in the country. Known as expedited removal, people detained under the policy aren’t entitled to a court hearing, but are instead subject to immediate expulsion from the country.
Under the Biden administration, expedited removals were limited to people caught within 100 miles of the border with less than two weeks of continuous presence in the United States.
Increasing the number of people who can be deported is the Trump administration’s latest move against illegal immigration, capping a week of anti-immigration actions that saw the Republican
block asylum applicationsand attempt to
erase birthright citizenship. Immigrant advocates and legal experts alike believe that expanding the “
border zone” — the region within which law enforcement officials can sidestep due process rights to detain people suspected of lacking proper authorization — to the entire country would make it far easier to realize the Republican’s campaign promise to expel more than 11 million undocumented people.
“This is a huge expansion that really sets up the groundwork for raids, rapid removal and racial profiling,” said Laura Belous, an attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
Removing due process protections provided by the immigration court system is a key part of Trump’s plan to expel millions of immigrants, said Lynn Marcus, the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Arizona.
“This is definitely one of the tools that the administration is trying to use to accomplish mass deportations, because it gets around all the procedural protections that people have in immigration courts and it allows them to remove people very quickly,” she said.
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