WASHINGTON – An undocumented worker who has lived in the United States for a year and eight months and cannot quickly produce documentation of that fact now has no automatic right to appear before an immigration judge before the federal government sends them home. A federal appeals court made that the law of the land this week.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 Tuesday to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s expanded use of expedited removal, fast-track deportation without a court hearing, for undocumented immigrants anywhere in the United States. The panel reversed a ruling from U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, who had blocked the policy last August on grounds that it likely violated constitutional due process protections. NPR reported the decision Tuesday, based on the court’s written opinion.
Expedited removal is not new. Congress authorized it in 1996 as a mechanism for quickly deporting migrants caught shortly after crossing the border or arriving by sea, without requiring the full proceedings of an immigration court. What Trump changed in January 2026, on his first week back in office, was its geographic scope: an executive order expanded the program to cover any undocumented immigrant anywhere in the United States who cannot demonstrate that they have lived in the country continuously for at least two years.
That shift carries profound practical consequences. Before the expansion, an undocumented immigrant apprehended in Chicago or Atlanta who had been in the country for more than a week was generally entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, with the right to apply for asylum or other forms of relief. Under Trump’s January order, that same person is eligible for removal within days, with no guaranteed judicial review, if they cannot prove the two-year threshold. The 1996 statute leaves to the executive branch the discretion to decide how broadly to apply the procedure, and the DC Circuit’s majority held Tuesday that Trump’s expansion was a lawful exercise of that discretion.
The two judges in the majority were both appointed by Trump. The dissent came from the Obama-appointed judge on the panel, who argued the expansion deprives people of due process rights in a way the 1996 statute did not sanction. The dissenting opinion also noted a structural flaw in enforcement: the policy does not require immigration agents to ask a migrant how long they have been in the country or to inform them of the two-year threshold before initiating removal. A person with a legitimate two-year claim who simply doesn’t know to raise it could be deported without recourse.
The ruling arrives after a week of immigration victories for the Trump administration at the appellate and Supreme Court levels. On Thursday, a federal judge blocked Trump’s mail ballot order in 22 states, a rare setback, but earlier in the week the Supreme Court, in 6-3 rulings on ideological lines, cleared the way for the administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and Syrians and to reinstate metering policies that allow officials to turn away asylum seekers before they reach the border.
Together, the three rulings constitute a broad expansion of the executive branch’s authority over immigration enforcement, achieved through courts rather than legislation. Congress has not passed new immigration enforcement law since 1996. The administration has instead used existing statutory authority, covering TPS designation, metering, and expedited removal, and argued that the same statutes that created these mechanisms also give the president wide discretion over how to apply them. The DC Circuit’s majority accepted that argument Tuesday in the expedited removal case.
The practical question is one of scale. The administration has said expanded expedited removal is necessary for the logistical reality of removing large numbers of people quickly. Immigration courts are backed up by years; formal removal proceedings for a single case can take a decade. Expedited removal, where it applies, collapses that process into days. What the courts have not been asked to resolve yet is whether the procedure, as expanded and as enforced, produces a statistically significant number of wrongful removals, people with valid claims who are deported before those claims can be heard.
Judge Cobb’s original ruling blocking the expansion last August had made exactly that argument: the procedure “likely violated due process rights and risked wrongful removal.” The DC Circuit’s majority did not fully engage that factual question Tuesday, ruling instead on the narrower statutory question of whether the administration had the legal authority to expand the program at all. It held that it did. The constitutional questions about how that authority is exercised in individual cases remain open, and could form the basis of future litigation even if this ruling stands.
Immigration attorneys and rights organizations said the ruling exposes millions of people to rapid removal without adequate procedural safeguards. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had backed the challenge to the expansion, said it was reviewing the ruling and considering options including a Supreme Court appeal. Whether the Supreme Court would take such a case is uncertain; it has already ruled favorably for the administration on related immigration questions this term, and may view expedited removal as a settled statutory matter.
What the ruling does not resolve is the enforcement dimension. ICE has prioritized deportations based on criminal history throughout the Trump administration, but the expanded expedited removal authority does not require such prioritization. Any undocumented person who cannot meet the two-year threshold is now potentially eligible for fast-track removal anywhere in the country. Whether and how aggressively ICE exercises that authority in practice is a question of resource allocation and political direction, not legal permission. The DC Circuit gave the administration the permission. The direction is the White House’s to set.
