A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume using a fast-track deportation process throughout the country that is typically reserved for people apprehended shortly after crossing the southern border.
The decision revived a pillar of President Trump’s mass deportation plans, after a lower court ruled last August that attempts to use the procedure to potentially remove millions of people without immigration hearings most likely violated their due process rights and risked wrongful detentions.
In a 2-to-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that it did not violate immigrants’ rights to use the policy to the maximum extent allowed by law. Judge Justin R. Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, also a Trump appointee. Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a dissent that he would have let the lower court’s ruling stand.
Writing for the majority, Judge Walker wrote that Congress had delegated to the executive branch decisions about which migrants to designate for expedited deportations.
“For many years, while some were designated, others were not,” he wrote. “But that changed in January 2025 when the executive expanded expedited removal to the maximum extent allowed by Congress,” he wrote.
He added that the Homeland Security Department was not legally required to tell those arrested that they could avoid expedited removal if they could prove a they had been in the country continuously for at least two years.
“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” the opinion said.
Immediately upon taking office in January, Mr. Trump empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use the process, known as expedited removal, against an expanded population of unauthorized immigrants.
Expedited removal had been used narrowly for undocumented migrants detained near the southern border. It allows officials to deport people who have been in the country for less than two years without hearings in immigration courts.
Mr. Trump’s expanded policy encouraged agents to detain and designate for rapid removal migrants questioned even deep in the country’s interior if they could not produce proof on the spot that they had been in the country beyond that two-year threshold.
But judges have been deeply skeptical of the policy, noting that throwing out immigrants’ rights to challenge their removal in court could lead to abuse when carried out at scale.
During a hearing last December, the three-judge appeals court panel focused on how immigration agents had used the policy in 2025 before it was blocked by a lower court. Judges pressed Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the government, for specifics.
The three judges questioned why the government had waited until October 2025 to share with the court a policy memo circulated at ICE last February, which explained how and when expedited removal should be used.
The guidance instructed agents that if someone apprehended by immigration agents professed to have been in the country longer than two years, they should be given “a brief but reasonable opportunity” to provide documentation to avoid being placed in expedited removal. Judge Walker wrote in the opinion on Tuesday that as long as migrants are provided that “reasonable opportunity,” the requirements of the law had been fulfilled.
In his dissent, Judge Wilkins wrote that the Department of Homeland Security had not disputed that in using the policy, it had deported a number of individuals who had been in the country longer than two years.
“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” he wrote.
In a statement, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the ruling. He wrote that the department had long “arbitrarily limited expedited removal” though the law allows it to be used more broadly.
He said the appeals court had “vindicated” the Trump administration’s practices.
Anand Balakrishnan, a lawyer representing Make the Road New York, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, said that such groups had been in the dark about how the procedure had been used. He argued that the decision to give undocumented migrants an opportunity to state their case, and avoid being placed into fast-track deportation, was being made by individual agents with little oversight.
“I don’t have any clue how this process is supposed to work in practice, particularly when the only check on it is that individual officer who is supposedly, in their discretion, providing them with time,” he said.
Mr. Balakrishnan said the aggressive expansion of the policy effectively left everyone without full legal status vulnerable to being placed on a fast track for deportation, including those who had lived in the country for decades and had deep ties to their communities or to U.S. citizens.
But Mr. Balakrishnan had faced skeptical questioning from both Judge Rao and Judge Walker. At one point, Judge Walker appeared to dismiss the case as an attempt to stall the deportation process nationally, rather than maintain what had for decades been a more circumscribed use of the expedited removal process.
Judge Walker observed that all of the people challenging the policy were in the country illegally.
“So whether they get expedited removal or nonexpedited removal, the proper result is removal, right?” he said.
“I don’t know whether the proper result is removal,” Mr. Balakrishnan said. “I mean, the proper result would be procedures to access the relief that Congress has afforded them.”
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