Washington According to an internal memo, the Trump administration is granting immigration agents more power to swiftly deport foreign nationals, including those the Biden administration temporarily permitted to enter the country on parole.
Because parole is a discretionary immigration status for immigrants who entered the country within the last two years, officials may attempt to revoke it, according to a memo released Thursday by Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. For those immigrants, that parole granted a temporary legal status.
The document rescinding parole status was first published by the New York Times.
With the separate reintroduction of a 2019 policy this week known as accelerated removal, such revocation may put those immigrants in the process of being deported quickly. That program was implemented during the first administration of President Donald Trump, who ran on a platform of implementing mass deportations in 2024.
If an undocumented immigrant encounters federal enforcement anywhere in the nation under accelerated removal, they must demonstrate that they have been in the country continuously for more than two years.
They will be deported quickly without having to appear before an immigration judge if they are unable to provide that documentation.
Compared to previous President Joe Biden’s accelerated removal process, the Trump administration’s approach is significantly more comprehensive. It applied to undocumented immigrants who had to demonstrate they had been in the nation for more than 14 days and was restricted to a radius of 100 miles from the southern border.
According to immigration experts, the expedited removal process can endanger many people, even citizens of the United States.
According to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies migration, migrants who are subject to expedited removal must demonstrate that they have been in the country for more than two years, that they are in a legal status, or that they have a claim of persecution. The process is so quick that it is possible for a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident to be wrongfully arrested or even deported.
The CBP One app, which has helped almost 1 million asylum seekers schedule appointments with U.S. officials, is one of the parole programs that might be included by the Thursday letter. Those who have been in the US for less than two years and used the app may be deported quickly.
Another is the program that permitted some 530,000 individuals from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti to reside and work in the United States. Those from Ukraine who were granted parole may also be included.
Trump, who frequently criticizes the use of the programs, signed an executive order on Monday that shuts down the CBP One app and ends parole for Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti.
As a result, immigrants who participated in those programs may be at risk of being removed quickly.
The recent letter, according to lawyer Karen Tumlin, who opposed a number of Trump administration immigration policy, is extremely broad and illegal.
It is, in my opinion, plainly meant to apply to parolees in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. “I still have a lot of questions about exactly how they do it,” said Tumlin, director of the immigration advocacy organization Justice Action Center. It’s not legally valid, in my opinion. We won’t think twice about contesting that in court.
According to Bush-Joseph, DHS can quickly identify and assign removal priority to persons in the parole program because they must provide a great deal of information in order to be accepted.
According to her, the government is aware of these individuals’ existence and their residences, in contrast to those who have been living in the shadows and are unknown to the authorities.
The memo came after Huffman issued a separate order on Thursday to extend the Department of Justice’s immigration enforcement powers to a number of law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals.
The expedited removal policy was implemented in 2019 during the first Trump administration, although it was only in effect for three months before the conclusion of Trump’s first term because of legal challenges.
Bush-Joseph stated that this time around is different because there is no injunction preventing the 2019 notice from being implemented and more persons have been paroled into the nation in the past two years.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a fresh complaint against the Trump administration’s return to the 2019 policy in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday.
The policy will support Trump’s pledge of mass deportations, according to a statement from Anand Balakrishnan, lead counsel on the case and senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project.
“We are once again here to fight it,” he said, adding that expanding expedited removal would offer Trump a cheat code to get around the Constitution and due process.
Trump also increased ICE enforcement during the first week of his second term. In addition to other social services and relief sites, he revoked a decree that restricted immigration enforcement to so-called sensitive settings, including schools, houses of worship, hospitals, and funeral homes.
In a raid on a Newark, New Jersey, business on Thursday, ICE officers arrested many undocumented residents and a U.S. military veteran without a warrant, according to city officials.
