A federal judge in Washington barred the Trump administration on Friday from summarily removing hundreds of thousands of migrants who had been paroled into the United States after fleeing instability or violence in their home countries, blocking an aggressive push by the Department of Homeland Security to deport noncitizens.
The move came in a ruling by Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that blocked the administration’s termination of a Biden-era program that allowed migrants fleeing Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to stay in the United States for up to two years. The ruling halted, for now, the rapid removal of individuals paroled into the United States “at any time.”
The Trump administration had announced the end of the program in March. It has since issued a number of other directives authorizing expedited removals by immigration agents and suspended or terminated programs that had allowed various groups of noncitizens to enter the country on a temporary basis.
In her ruling, Judge Cobb said the case presented “a question of fair play,” expressing dismay at what she described as an already tenuous legal landscape shifting under migrants’ feet at the whim of the Trump administration. She noted recent efforts to step up detention and deportation quotas, leaving migrants subject to rapid deportation at the hands of immigration agents, often with little recourse to challenge their arrest or removal through normal channels.
“In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,” she wrote of the migrants admitted under the program. “Now, the Government has not only closed off those pathways for new arrivals but changed the game for parolees already here, restricting their ability to seek immigration relief and subjecting them to summary removal despite statutory law prohibiting the executive branch from doing so.”
Judge Cobb, a Biden appointee, also noted a marked rise in expedited removals after pressure from Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who in May demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement step up immigration arrests to 3,000 per day.
Judge Cobb took particular exception to the government’s use of expedited removal more generally, noting that it left people who might be seeking other avenues to stay in the country legally deprived of access to their families or lawyers.
She highlighted the experience of several of the individuals involved the lawsuit, who had sought to remain in the country legally since being admitted but had been arrested by ICE agents immediately upon leaving hearings in immigration court.
“This case’s underlying question, then, asks whether parolees who escaped oppression will have the chance to plead their case within a system of rules,” she wrote in a passage dotted with case references. “Or, alternatively, will they be summarily removed from a country that — as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges — may look to them more and more like the countries they tried to escape.”
“By design, the expedited removal process offers few opportunities to raise objections to eligibility for removal, or to get a neutral adjudicator’s eyes on such objections,” she added.
It was not fully clear exactly how many people were covered by the order, which Judge Cobb wrote applied to “individuals who have been, at any time, paroled into the United States at a point of entry.” As of last year, more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela had entered the country through the program, but many people were granted parole from other countries as well.
The ruling came after a federal judge in California blocked the administration on Thursday from pulling protections offered by another program, known as Temporary Protected Status, from around 60,000 migrants from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua. In that decision, Judge Trina L. Thompson of the Northern District of California stressed that many migrants reported facing persistent racism and xenophobia by the Trump administration this year.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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