(Reuters) -A federal judge on Friday halted Trump administration policies aimed at expanding fast-track deportations, ruling that they violate the constitutional due process rights of migrants who could be apprehended anywhere nationally.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington, D.C., sided with an immigrant rights group to put on hold two policies President Donald Trump's administration adopted in January that exposed millions of additional migrants to the risk of rapid expulsion.
That expedited removal process has for nearly three decades been used to quickly return migrants apprehended at the border. But in January, the administration expanded its scope to cover non-citizens apprehended anywhere in the United States who could not show they had been in the country for two years.
The policy mirrored one the Trump administration adopted in 2019 that Democratic President Joe Biden's administration later rescinded, and immigration authorities have made "aggressive" use of the new removal power in recent months, Cobb said.
But she said that unlike the population of migrants traditionally subject to expedited removal who were detained shortly after crossing the border, the group now being targeted had long since entered the country.
"That means that they have a weighty liberty interest in remaining here and therefore must be afforded due process under the Fifth Amendment," she said. "When it exponentially expanded the population subject to expedited removal, the Government did not, however, in any way adapt its procedures to this new group of people."
Cobb, a Biden appointee, said that "prioritizing speed over all else will inevitably lead the Government to erroneously remove people via this truncated process." She called it a "skimpy" process that violates affected migrants' due process rights under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment.
The administration had asked Cobb to pause her eventual ruling so it could prepare an appeal, but she declined to do so.
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security official said in a statement that the ruling ignored Trump's legal authority, adding he "has a mandate to arrest and deport the worst of the worst."
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the plaintiff, Make the Road New York, did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this month, Cobb also blocked the Trump administration from fast-tracking the deportation of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were paroled into the U.S. under Biden's humanitarian programs.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
