A federal judge has halted the Trump administration’s attempt to expand fast-track deportations across the United States, ruling that the policy violated illegal immigrants’ constitutional rights to due process.
In an Aug. 29 decision, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb temporarily blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) January order authorizing “expedited removal” for illegal immigrants arrested anywhere in the country who cannot prove two years of continuous residence.
Cobb’s ruling pauses both the Jan. 21 DHS designation expanding expedited removal nationwide and the Jan. 23 guidance implementing it—known as the Huffman Memorandum—while the case proceeds.
She said the administration’s policy risks sweeping up people who have lived in the country long enough to deserve full hearings before deportation. Unlike new border crossers, Cobb wrote, such individuals “have a weighty liberty interest in remaining here and therefore must be afforded due process.”…