Appeals Court Lets Trump Deport Migrants Nationwide Without a Hearing

On June 23, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit cleared the way for the Trump administration to use expedited removal — a fast-track deportation procedure that bypasses immigration judges entirely — anywhere in the United States. In a 2-1 ruling, Trump-appointed judges Justin Walker and Neomi Rao vacated a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, that had blocked the policy in 2025. Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, dissented.

The decision puts an enforcement weapon in ICE’s hands that is, by design, almost impossible to fight.

How Expedited Removal Works

For three decades, expedited removal was a narrow tool — used to quickly return migrants caught at or near the border within two weeks of crossing. Under the procedure, a single immigration officer can order deportation. There is no immigration judge. There is no right to a lawyer. There is no meaningful appeal. The encounter, the determination, and the removal can all happen within hours.

On the first day of his second term in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order extending expedited removal to the entire country and to anyone who could not prove two years of continuous U.S. residence. Immigration agents began grabbing people from courthouse hallways, workplaces, and schools, and deporting them within days. Judge Cobb’s August 2025 order paused that expansion while a constitutional challenge — brought by the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project — moved forward.

The D.C. Circuit’s ruling unfreezes the policy nationwide while the underlying case continues. ICE can now resume removing people from anywhere in the United States without a court hearing.

The Due-Process Problem the Majority Waved Away

Judge Walker, writing for the majority, declared that “the constitutional requirement is notice of the action the government is taking and the grounds for it, plus an opportunity to respond.” On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, as Judge Wilkins’s dissent laid out, immigration officers are not required to ask people how long they have lived in the United States, are not required to explain the two-year rule, and are not required to give detainees any meaningful chance to gather documentation. A person who has lived in the country for a decade — but happens to be carrying no proof of it the moment ICE shows up — is “simply left to hope that the immigration officer will conclude” otherwise, Wilkins wrote.

That hope is the only process Trump’s deportation machine offers.

Who Gets Deported This Way

The Trump administration has already deported more than 600,000 people in his second term, and ICE has more than doubled in size — from 10,000 to 22,000 officers and agents. Nearly two-thirds of the men removed have no criminal convictions. A Washington Post analysis published earlier in June found that an increasing share of deportees are long-time residents — fathers, workers, neighbors who have built lives here.

Expedited removal turns each of those people into a paperwork problem the government can solve in an afternoon. There is no judicial check, no chance for relatives to find a lawyer, no day in court. The ACLU said the ruling “undermines the fundamental principle that people receive due process when the government seeks to deport them.” Make the Road New York warned it will “lead to countless unjust or wrongful deportations.”

It already has. Earlier this year, the administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison in what its own filings later admitted was an “administrative error.” The court system spent months trying to claw him back. Multiply that by a deportation system now empowered to remove people without any hearing at all, and the predictable result is large numbers of U.S. citizens, lawful residents, and asylum-seekers being shipped out of the country with no recourse.

The Pattern of Court Capture

The ruling is also a reminder of why Trump fought so hard to fill the federal bench in his first term. The D.C. Circuit panel that handed him this victory was two-thirds Trump appointees. Neomi Rao was elevated from a Trump regulatory post; Justin Walker is one of the youngest circuit judges in the country and a former Brett Kavanaugh clerk. Their interpretation of due process is doing exactly what the administration designed it to do: turning the constitutional minimum into a rubber stamp.

The case is not over. The ACLU will continue litigating the underlying merits, and the Supreme Court may have the final word. But for now, ICE has the green light to use a procedure that the Constitution’s framers, who built explicit habeas corpus protections into Article I, would not recognize as legal process at all. The administration that promised “mass deportation now” has just been handed the procedural mechanism to deliver it — and the only thing standing between any non-citizen and a one-way ticket out of the country is the discretion of a single ICE officer.