01-08-2025
Judge Bars Expedited Deportations of Migrants Paroled Into U.S.
A federal judge in Washington barred the Trump administration on Friday from summarily removing hundreds of thousands of migrants who had been paroled into the United States after fleeing instability or violence in their home countries, blocking an aggressive push by the Department of Homeland Security to deport noncitizens.
The move came in a ruling by Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that blocked the administration's termination of a Biden-era program that allowed migrants fleeing Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to stay in the United States for up to two years. The ruling halted, for now, the rapid removal of individuals paroled into the United States 'at any time.'
The Trump administration had announced the end of the program in March. It has since issued a number of other directives authorizing expedited removals by immigration agents and suspended or terminated programs that had allowed various groups of noncitizens to enter the country on a temporary basis.
In her ruling, Judge Cobb said the case presented 'a question of fair play,' expressing dismay at what she described as an already tenuous legal landscape shifting under migrants' feet at the whim of the Trump administration. She noted recent efforts to step up detention and deportation quotas, leaving migrants subject to rapid deportation at the hands of immigration agents, often with little recourse to challenge their arrest or removal through normal channels.
'In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,' she wrote of the migrants admitted under the program. 'Now, the Government has not only closed off those pathways for new arrivals but changed the game for parolees already here, restricting their ability to seek immigration relief and subjecting them to summary removal despite statutory law prohibiting the executive branch from doing so.'
Judge Cobb, a Biden appointee, also noted a marked rise in expedited removals after pressure from Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who in May demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement step up immigration arrests to 3,000 per day.
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