Immigrant arrests at courthouses signal new tactic in Trump's deportation push - WaPo
Masked officers descended on courthouses across the country this week and arrested stunned immigrants showing up for scheduled immigration hearings as part of a new directive from federal officials aimed at dramatically accelerating deportations.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Arizona, Virginia and more than 20 other states have been instructed to arrest people immediately after a judge has ordered them to be deported or after prosecutors move to drop their cases, according to internal documents issued this month and reviewed by The Washington Post. The Trump administration is planning to then place immigrants whose cases are dismissed and who have been in the country less than two years into a fast-track removal process that does not involve a hearing before a judge.
The coordinated operation is the government’s latest attempt to quickly remove people from the country — even if officials have to bypass the courts — as concern grows in the White House that President Donald Trump won’t be able to fulfill his campaign promise to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
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Historically, expedited removals have been more commonly used at the border, but the Trump administration is expanding their use throughout the nation’s interior. The president made a similar attempt in 2019 during his first term but was stopped by a federal judge. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups filed a federal lawsuit in January in the District of Columbia seeking to block the latest expansion, saying it violates immigrants’ constitutional rights as well as other U.S. laws. They said asylum seekers “would get less due process contesting their deportation than they would contesting a traffic ticket.”
As the case remains ongoing in court, Trump officials are moving forward with pushing through his effort to quickly arrest and deport immigrants. Department of Homeland Security attorneys in cities and states across the country this week moved to dismiss scores of deportation cases, saying people were free to go. But as soon as the immigrants left the courtrooms, a phalanx of federal law enforcement officers were waiting to handcuff them and take them to immigration detention.
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How cruel can they be