June 25, 2026: A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume carrying out expedited removal or speedy deportations of undocumented migrants throughout the United States, not just near the border.
Expedited removal is a process by which low-level immigration officers can summarily remove certain noncitizens from the United States without a hearing before an immigration judge. Created in 1996 as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the expedited removal statute applies to noncitizens who arrive at a port of entry and to some noncitizens who enter without having been admitted or paroled (those who “enter without inspection”) and who have not been continuously present in the United States for at least two years. Expedited removal is only applicable to people in those categories who either lack the proper entry documents or who seek or have sought entry through fraud or misrepresentation.
From June 2020 through March 2022, and again in January 2025 to the present, immigration officers have been authorized to apply it to:
- Any noncitizen who arrived at a port of entry, at any time, and is determined to be inadmissible for fraud or misrepresentation or lacking proper entry documents and
- Any noncitizen who entered without inspection (by land or sea), was never admitted or paroled, is encountered anywhere in the United States, and cannot prove that they have been physically present in the United States for the two years preceding the immigration officer’s determination that they are inadmissible for fraud or misrepresentation or lack of proper entry documents.
Once an immigration officer determines that a noncitizen is subject to expedited removal, that same officer orders the noncitizen removed. Unlike other removal orders, an expedited removal order cannot normally be appealed and carries a five-year reentry bar in most circumstances.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a lower court decision that temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s expanded use of expedited removal. The ruling was a big victory for the Republican administration, which views the expansion of so-called expedited removal as a key tool for carrying out its mass deportation policy.
In January 2025, Trump expanded its use to undocumented migrants all over the United States. Immigration agents began whisking migrants away from courthouses where they had gone for immigration proceedings and then removing them from the country within days.
For more information on expedited removal,
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