Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump got another piece of bad news Friday on a front not related to tariffs. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Joe Biden appointee who was narrowly confirmed on a party-line vote, shot down the administration's fast-track removal process—because it violates the law. Until Trump v2.0, fast-track deportations applied only to migrants apprehended within 100 miles of an international border and then only to migrants who had been in the country for less than 2 weeks. It was a tool Congress gave ICE to catch people who had just snuck into the country and were still near the border. It was never intended to be a way to arrest and deport people who had been in the country for years and were nowhere near the border when apprehended, which is what ICE has been doing under Trump's orders (actually, Stephen Miller's orders).
Cobb did not rule on the constitutionality of the law, merely that ICE was applying it to people to whom it did not apply per the text of the law. For people long in the country and far from the border, due process applies and there has to be a hearing before an immigration judge. Assuming the ruling holds when it gets to the Supreme Court—and that is a very big assumption—then henceforth when the administration captures and simply deports people from, say, a slaughterhouse in Iowa, it will be openly breaking the law.
In her 48-page opinion, Cobb noted that in a rush to meet the arbitrary quota of 3,000 arrests/day imposed by Miller, ICE was staking out courthouses and targeting people legally pursuing asylum claims before the courts had a chance to rule on those claims. Cobb also noted that everyone in the U.S. has a right to due process, even those people in the country illegally. The government can expel them, she wrote, but it has to follow the law when doing so. In particular, she noted that agents sometimes arrest people who are citizens or are otherwise legally in the country and they are entitled to make their case in court that they are legal. ICE can't just arrest and deport someone because some agent thinks that person might be in the country illegally, except in the limited situations prescribed by the law.
This is not Cobb's first case involving deportations. In July, she ruled that the hundreds of thousands of migrants who had been accepted into the country under parole programs could not be summarily arrested and deported. There, too, she insisted that the administration had to hold a hearing before an immigration judge before they could deport a parolee. The mere fact that Donald Trump was complaining that the courts were not letting him get whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it was not a valid reason for breaking the law. If she keeps this up, he is not going to invite her over for his Christmas party. (V)