A federal appeals court on Tuesday cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport undocumented migrants from anywhere in the United States without a court hearing, sharply expanding a fast-track removal process that until now was confined to the border. A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 2-1 to lift a lower-court order that had blocked the expansion, handing the administration one of its most consequential immigration wins to date.
The procedure at issue is "expedited removal," which lets immigration officers order a deportation within days and without review by an immigration judge. Before this year it applied only to people caught at or near the border shortly after entering, or who arrived by sea. The Department of Homeland Security moved in 2025 to apply it across the country to any undocumented person who cannot quickly prove they have lived in the U.S. for more than two years — a vastly larger pool of people.
Writing for the majority, Judge Justin Walker said the government is under no obligation to affirmatively tell migrants that they can avoid expedited removal by showing they have been in the country longer than two years. Walker and Judge Neomi Rao, both appointed by Trump, formed the majority; the panel's third member, an appointee of President Obama, dissented.
The ruling sets aside an injunction issued last August by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, who had found the expansion lacked adequate safeguards to keep long-term residents and even citizens from being wrongly swept up and removed before they could contest it. With her order now stayed, DHS can resume the expanded policy while the underlying legal challenge continues.
The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project on behalf of advocacy groups. "This decision undermines the fundamental principle that people receive due process when the government seeks to deport them," said Anand Balakrishnan, a senior staff attorney with the project, signaling the plaintiffs will keep fighting the policy on the merits and could seek further review.
For the administration, expedited removal is a central instrument of the mass-deportation agenda President Trump campaigned on. Conducting removals without immigration-court hearings sidesteps a backlog that exceeds three million cases and can leave individuals waiting years for a decision. Officials argue the law has long authorized nationwide use of the tool and that prior administrations simply declined to invoke it to its full extent.
Critics counter that the speed is the danger. Because an expedited-removal order is issued by a line officer rather than a judge, the burden falls on the migrant to produce documentary proof of continuous presence on the spot — pay stubs, leases, school or medical records — or face removal within days, often without a lawyer. Immigration attorneys warn that lawful permanent residents, asylum seekers with valid claims, and U.S. citizens lacking papers in the moment can be caught in the dragnet.
The decision is procedural rather than final: the panel ruled only that the government is likely enough to prevail, and that the balance of harms favors letting the policy operate, for the injunction to be lifted while litigation proceeds. The plaintiffs can ask the full D.C. Circuit to rehear the matter en banc or petition the Supreme Court, and the district court will still rule on whether the expansion is ultimately lawful.
In practice, the ruling means the reach of expedited removal now depends heavily on enforcement discretion and on whether the people it touches can document their time in the country. Legal-aid organizations have urged immigrants to carry evidence of long-term residence, though they acknowledge that an encounter with agents leaves little room to assemble a record.
The fight is the latest in a series of clashes between the administration and the federal courts over the limits of executive power on immigration, an arena where emergency stays and appeals have repeatedly reshaped policy faster than the underlying cases can be resolved. With the injunction lifted, the expanded program takes effect immediately even as its constitutionality remains unsettled.