A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from rapidly deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had previously been paroled into the United States to flee violence and oppression in their home countries.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb said in a ruling Friday that the Department of Homeland Security’s tactics — rapid-fire deportation proceedings with little to no chance to lodge challenges — amounted to changing the rules in the middle of the game for people previously welcomed into the country on a temporary basis.
Cobb barred foreigners with immigration parole, typically a short-term status that allows foreigners to live and work in the U.S. legally, from being subjected to a controversial maneuver the administration has adopted in recent months: dismissing immigrants’ pending proceedings in immigration court — only to immediately arrest them outside the courtroom and put them into a sped-up deportation process known as expedited removal.
“In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,” Cobb, a Biden appointee, wrote. “Now, the Government has not only closed off those pathways for new arrivals but changed the game for parolees already here.”
That new tactic arrived amid pressure within the Trump administration to ramp up arrests in support of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, a detail Cobb cited in her ruling. But she said the basis for the expansion of “expedited removal” and for targeting those previously granted parole exceeded the administration’s legal authority and was arbitrary.
The White House has put intense pressure on Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest numbers, with the aim of 3,000 a day. Trump officials view the immigration courts as one of the biggest roadblocks in reaching its goal of 1 million annual deportations and have used the immigration court arrests to increase its numbers.
Immigration attorneys have scrambled to adapt to the tactic in recent months, preparing their clients for the possibility of being detained at ICE check-ins and immigration courts. The arrests have spurred fear in immigrant communities across the country, with attorneys warning of a chilling effect among immigrants who have long followed the rules.
“This case’s underlying question, then, asks whether parolees who escaped oppression will have the chance to plead their case within a system of rules. Or, alternatively, will they be summarily removed from a country that — as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges, may look to them more and more like the countries from which they tried to escape?”
It’s unclear how many immigrants are impacted by Cobb’s ruling. She estimated the number as “hundreds of thousands,” but statistics compiled by Republican lawmakers and immigration opponents suggest the figure could be 1 million or more.
As illegal crossings at the border with Mexico mushroomed into a political crisis during the Biden administration, officials increasingly turned to immigration parole as a means to limit chaotic scenes at the border by allowing immigrants from Central America to enter the U.S. legally.
A report presented at a House hearing in April by a group favoring greater restrictions on immigration, the Center for Immigration Studies, estimated that the Biden administration granted immigration parole to 2.8 million people. However, only some of those people would be impacted by the judge’s ruling Friday since federal law bars the use of expedited removal against immigrants who have been living in the U.S. for more than two years.
The new ruling specifically blocks three Trump administration directives: a Jan. 23 memo authorizing the use of “expedited removal” as broadly as possible; a Feb. 18 Immigration and Customs Enforcement directive authorizing expedited removal for “paroled arriving aliens”; and a March 25 notice canceling parole status for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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