(Reuters)-A United States Federal Judge suspended on Friday the policies of Donald Trump’s government designed to expand accelerated deportations, determining that they violate constitutional rights of immigrants due to access to legal process.
US District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington DC supported an immigrant rights group to suspend two policies adopted by President Donald Trump’s government in January, which exposed millions of additional migrants to the risk of rapid expulsion from the country.
This accelerated removal process has been used for almost three decades to quickly return immigrants detained on the border. But in January, the government expanded its scope to cover non -detained citizens anywhere in the US who could not show that they have been in the country for two years.
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Politics mirrors one adopted by Trump in 2019 that the government of Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded later. 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 accelerated removal that were arrested shortly after crossing the border, the group that has been targeted now has entered the country for a long time.
“This means that they have an important interest of freedom to stay here and therefore they should receive due process of law according to the fifth amendment,” she said. “When exponentially expanded the population subject to accelerated removal, the government, however, has in no way adapted its procedures to this new group of people.”
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Cobb, named by Biden, said that “prioritizing speed over everything will inevitably lead the government to erroneously remove people through this truncated process.” She called him a “reduced” process that violates the rights of due process of migrants affected according to the fifth amendment of the US Constitution.
The government asked COBB to pause the decision so that it could prepare an appeal, but the judge refused.
A US internal security department official said in a statement that the decision ignored Trump’s legal authority, adding that he “has a mandate to arrest and deport the worst of the worst.”
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Earlier this month, Cobb also prevented the Trump government accelerating the deportation of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were placed on parole in the US under Biden’s humanitarian programs.
