A federal judge offered a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump’s massive deportation scheme, while blocking the government’s attempts to remove immigrants who entered the country on parole.
U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb said the Department of Homeland Security blocked three recent agency actions that expanded the expedited removal of parolees, arguing that new policy changes were arbitrary and capricious and had exceeded its statutory authority.
In her 87-page ruling, Cobb slammed the Trump administration’s extrajudicial removals of immigrants who had been temporarily granted entry to the United States while awaiting admission application results, calling the case “a question of fair play.”
Plaintiffs who had followed the rules of their parole had suddenly been detained by immigration authorities. In some instances, their asylum cases had been abruptly dismissed, but in others they had not. Immigrants who had entered the country on parole were made subject to expedited removal, which provides minimal opportunities for immigrants to challenge their deportation.
“In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,” Cobb wrote. “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.”
“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. 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 from which they tried to escape?”
Cobb determined that the parolees represented by the plaintiff nonprofit organizations, and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like them who’d been paroled at a port of entry, faced “imminent, irreparable injury” that “outweighs any harm to the Government or the public from pressing pause.”
The government actions, including the termination of the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole program in March, would be stayed until a final verdict is reached.
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