The Trump administration says it can use a speedy deportation policy to boot out hundreds of thousands of migrants whose Biden-era “parole” protections have been canceled, meaning they won’t get a full immigration court hearing.
The process, known as expedited removal, is generally used only for new arrivals near the border. It allows them to be ousted within hours or days, as soon as the government can arrange transportation.
The Department of Homeland Security said the process also can be used for nearly a half-million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who are losing their legal status. The Supreme Court last week gave tacit approval for Secretary Kristi Noem to revoke their paroles.
The department said parole is a sort of grace period exception from immigration laws.
“When parole is canceled, an alien reverts to his previous status. For most of these aliens, that status would be an applicant for admission, which means that he or she would be subject to expedited removal,” a Homeland Security official told The Washington Times.
In layman’s terms, it’s as if the migrants were back at the border, having just shown up at a crossing point. Their months spent deep in the interior of the U.S. are erased, and their legal status is the same as a fresh arrival with no visa, meaning they have few rights to “due process” to delay or defeat their deportations.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and now legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said it’s the difficult price the migrants pay for trusting President Biden’s legally questionable parole promise.
“The Biden administration left these people as de facto legal hemophiliacs,” he said. “They were utterly vulnerable to any future administration with a different plan.”
Expedited removal could boost the Trump administration’s deportation numbers, but it’s not without controversy.
Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an immigration lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, and one of the leaders of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said Homeland Security is exploiting one of the law’s “gray areas.”
“First we let you in and then we gave you work authorization and then we unilaterally, without due process, took that right away, now we’re pretending you’re at the border and now we can detain you,” she said. “I think reasonable minds are going to go, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”
The migrants arrived as part of the CHNV program, a Biden initiative that created a mass carve-out from the usual immigration system.
Citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who prescheduled their arrivals, secured financial sponsors and flew to airports inside the U.S. were welcomed with a two-year parole that included a stay of deportation and a work permit.
CHNV was supposed to take pressure off the border, but Ms. Noem said it was a distortion of immigration laws and unnecessary, given President Trump’s ability to secure the border without it. In March, she revoked the status of the roughly half-million people enrolled.
A federal district court temporarily halted the revocation, but the Supreme Court blocked that order last week, allowing Ms. Noem to carry out the cancellations.
Without parole, most of the CHNV population is without legal status, meaning they should leave on their own.
For those who don’t leave, the question is what rights they have if they try to fight their deportations.
A normal deportation for someone in the interior can take months or even years and includes the chance for a full proceeding before an immigration judge.
Expedited removal, created by Congress, truncates that process. Migrants can still attempt an asylum claim, but they generally lack the right to appeal a removal decision.
Every administration uses the tool. Indeed, when the Biden team toughened its border policies toward the end of his term, it relied on expedited removal to oust tens of thousands of newcomers each month at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mr. Arthur said using expedited removal for the CHNV population is correct.
“As long as they’re in parole status, if they don’t have visas to enter the United States or they attempted to do so through fraud, they remain amenable to expedited removal,” he said.
Ms. Sharma-Crawford said the CHNV migrants look like people who have been admitted to the U.S., albeit not with a visa. That means they are not new arrivals and should fall outside the confines of expedited removal.
“That’s the basic argument, when you boil it down. The question becomes ‘can they’ versus ‘should they,’ and is that an acceptable thing to do,” she said.
In her revocation announcement in March, Ms. Noem teased the use of expedited removal.
She said one reason to revoke parole before migrants’ two-year terms expire is to preserve the use of the tool.
“If DHS were to allow the CHNV parolee population to remain for the full duration of their two-year parole, DHS would be compelled to place a greater proportion of this population in Section 240 removal proceedings to effectuate their removal, further straining the already overburdened immigration court system,” she said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.