Judge doesn’t allow extension of fast-track deportations nationwide
SAN DIEGO >> A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s move to vastly extend authority of immigration officers to deport people without allowing them to appear before judges, the third legal setback for its immigration agenda in one day.
The policy, which was announced in July but hasn’t yet been enforced, would allow fast-track deportations to apply to anyone in the country illegally for less than two years. Now they are largely limited to people arrested almost immediately after crossing the Mexican border.
U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, ruling late Friday in Washington, said the administration’s expansion of “expedited removal” authority violated procedural requirements to first seek public comment and ignored flaws in how it has been used on a smaller scale at the border. The shortcomings, which were not challenged by government lawyers, include allegations that some people entitled to be in the country were targeted for deportation, translators weren’t provided, and authorities made “egregious errors” recording statements of migrants who said they feared persecution or torture if sent back to their homelands.
“With respect to the policy at issue here, the potential devastation is so obvious that (the Department of Homeland Security) can be fairly faulted for its unexplained failure to predict, and attempt to mitigate, the fully foreseeable future floods,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, hasn’t ruled on merits of the case, but her decision prevents the administration from expanding fast-track authority nationwide while the lawsuit proceeds.
Earlier Friday, a federal judge in Los Angeles blocked new rules that would allow the government to detain immigrant children with their parents indefinitely, saying the move conflicted with a 1997 settlement agreement that requires the release of children caught on the border as quickly as possible to relatives in the U.S. and says they can only be held in facilities licensed by a state.
The Flores agreement — named for a teenage plaintiff — will remain in place and govern conditions for children in custody, including those with their parents.
Also Friday, another federal judge in Los Angeles blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from relying solely on flawed databases to target people for being in the country illegally. The decision affects detainers issued by an ICE officer in the federal court system’s Central District of California.