The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has quietly launched a nationwide fast-track deportation process dubbed “Expedited Removal.”
The fast-track process was created by Congress in 1996 but was ignored by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who quietly welcomed the inflow of consumers and cheap, illegal labor. The expedited process allows agents to arrest recently arrived migrants and deport them without intervention by pro-migration legal groups or sanctuary-city politicians.
The rollout comes after President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted an activating regulation in 2019, then fended off a series of lawsuits by pro-migration groups who decry the process as “snatch & deport,” and then trained agents on the new process.
“This is huge,” John Sandweg, Obama’s former acting head of ICE in the Obama administration, told the Bloomberg news service. “It can very significantly shift how immigration law is enforced,” he said October 6.
“I just… really can’t emphasize enough how scary this is,” said a tweet from a pro-migration activist. “There are literally millions of people in the US who are in dramatically greater danger of tragic, irreparable harm from state violence than they were a week ago,” said a tweet from a pro-migration activist.
The Expedited Removal process is just one of many reforms Trump has gradually established to streamline deportations, reform asylum rules, and curb economic migration.
These reforms — helped by the border wall — have shut down the dramatic migration of Central Americans quietly triggered by the adoption of loose enforcement rules in 2011 Obama’s deputies.
That migration has left the immigration courts clogged with a million legal cases — and at least one million migrants in U.S. workplaces and neighborhoods, alongside the illegal population which is estimated to include from 11 million to 20 million illegal migrants.
Trump’s popular reforms have been fought by business groups, Democrat legislators, sanctuary-city politicians, immigration lawyers, and progressives.
Buzzfeed reported:
The previous policy only allowed officials to use expedited removal within 100 miles of the border and for those who have been in the country for up to two weeks.
Currently, officers typically arrest immigrants and place them into deportation proceedings. These include a hearing before an immigration judge — a process that can take years. In practical terms, the expanded policy gives ICE officers more power to determine who can be quickly deported, although it’s unclear exactly how fast the process will be.
The shift could allow the Trump administration to increase deportations while circumventing a court system that is severely backed up and short on resources, but advocates for immigrants have said it would destroy their due process rights.
“Our ability to implement this important statutory tool will further enable us to protect our communities and preserve the integrity of our nation’s congressionally mandated immigration laws,” said a statement from Tony Pham, the interim director of the ICE.
The ICE statement said:
Pursuant to the July 2019 expedited removal designation, aliens, except for unaccompanied alien children, are subject to expedited removal if they:
are not already subject to an expedited removal designation
are encountered anywhere in the United States;
have not been admitted or paroled into the United States;
are determined to be inadmissible under sections 212(a)(6)(C) or (a)(7) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA); and
have not affirmatively shown, to the satisfaction of an immigration officer, that they have been physically present in the United States continuously for the two-year period immediately preceding the date of the determination of inadmissibility.
The policy will likely be shut down if Joe Biden is elected president in November.
Joe Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.
In contrast, Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers.
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