DHS plans to use expedited deportation on Biden's 'paroled' migrants

The Trump administration says it can use a speedy deportation policy to boot out hundreds of thousands of migrants who are having their Biden-era “parole” protections canceled, meaning they won’t get the chance to go through a full immigration court hearing.

The process, known as expedited removal, is generally used only on new arrivals near the border. It allows them to be ousted within a matter of hours or days — as soon as the government can arrange transportation.

The Department of Homeland Security, though, says it believes the process also can be used on nearly half a million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who are losing their legal status after the Supreme Court last week gave tacit approval for Secretary Kristi Noem to revoke their paroles.

The department said that’s because parole is a sort of grace-period exception from immigration laws.

“When parole is cancelled, an alien reverts to his previous status. For most of these aliens that status would be an applicant for admission, which means that he or she would be subject to expedited removal,” a Homeland Security official told The Washington Times.

Or, in layman’s terms, it’s as if they were back at the border, having just shown up at a crossing point. Their months of time deep in the interior of the U.S. are erased and their new legal status is the same as a fresh arrival with no visa — meaning they have few rights to “due process” to delay or defeat their deportation.

Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and now legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said that’s the difficult price the migrants pay for trusting a legally iffy parole promise made by President Biden.

“The Biden administration left these people as de facto legal hemophiliacs,” he said. “They were utterly vulnerable to any future administration with a different plan.”

The ability to use expedited removal could boost the Trump administration’s deportation numbers. But it’s not without controversy.

Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an immigration lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, and one of the leaders of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said Homeland Security is exploiting one of the “gray areas” in the law.

“First we let you in and then we gave you work authorization and then we unilaterally, without due process, took that right away, now we’re pretending you’re at the border and now we can detain you,” she said. “I think reasonable minds are going to go, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”

The migrants in question came as part of the CHNV program, a special Biden initiative that created a mass carve-out from the usual immigration system.

Citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who pre-scheduled their arrivals, secured a financial sponsor and flew to airports inside the U.S. were welcomed with a two-year parole, which included a stay of deportation and a work permit.

CHNV was supposed to take pressure off the border, but Ms. Noem said it was a distortion of immigration laws and unnecessary, given President Trump’s ability to secure the border without it. In March, she revoked the status of the roughly half-million people enrolled.

A federal district court had put that revocation on hold, but the Supreme Court last week blocked that order, allowing Ms. Noem to carry out the cancellations.

Without parole, most of the CHNV population is now without legal status, meaning they should leave on their own.

For those who don’t, though, the question is what sort of rights they have if they try to fight their deportation.

A normal deportation for someone in the interior can take months or even years and includes the chance at a full proceeding before an immigration judge.

Expedited removal, created by Congress, truncates that. Migrants can still attempt an asylum claim, but they generally lack the right to appeal a removal decision.

It’s a tool used by every administration. Indeed, when the Biden team toughened its border policies toward the end of his term, it relied on expedited removal to oust tens of thousands of newcomers each month at the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

Mr. Arthur said using it on the CHNV population is correct.

“As long as they’re in parole status, if they don’t have visas to enter the United States or they attempted to do so through fraud, they remain amenable to expedited removal,” he said.

But Ms. Sharma-Crawford said the CHNV migrants look, to her, like people who have been admitted to the U.S., albeit not with a visa. That means they’re not a new arrival and should fall outside the confines of expedited removal.

“That’s the basic argument, when you boil it down. The question becomes ‘can they’ versus ‘should they,’ and is that an acceptable thing to do,” she said.

Ms. Noem, in her revocation announcement in March, teased the use of expedited removal.

She said one reason to revoke parole early, before migrants’ two-year terms were up, was to preserve the use of the tool.

“If DHS were to allow the CHNV parolee population to remain for the full duration of their two-year parole, DHS would be compelled to place a greater proportion of this population in section 240 removal proceedings to effectuate their removal, further straining the already over-burdened immigration court system,” she said.