Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest a fugitive in 2020. | Photo via U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The Trump administration has revived a border security policy that legal experts say paves the way for mass deportations — without even a court hearing — and threatens to put Latinos, regardless of their citizenship status, at risk of racial profiling and removal from the country.
On Friday, the White House officially reinstated a 2019 policy greenlighting fast-tracked deportation proceedings for immigrants living anywhere in the United States who can’t prove more than two years of continuous presence in the country. Known as expedited removal, people detained under the policy aren’t entitled to a court hearing, but are instead subject to immediate expulsion from the country.
Under the Biden administration, expedited removals were limited to people caught within 100 miles of the border with less than two weeks of continuous presence in the United States.
Increasing the number of people who can be deported is the Trump administration’s latest move against illegal immigration, capping a week of anti-immigration actions that saw the Republican block asylum applications and attempt to erase birthright citizenship. Immigrant advocates and legal experts alike believe that expanding the “border zone” — the region within which law enforcement officials can sidestep due process rights to detain people suspected of lacking proper authorization — to the entire country would make it far easier to realize the Republican’s campaign promise to expel more than 11 million undocumented people.
“This is a huge expansion that really sets up the groundwork for raids, rapid removal and racial profiling,” said Laura Belous, an attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
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Removing due process protections provided by the immigration court system is a key part of Trump’s plan to expel millions of immigrants, said Lynn Marcus, the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Arizona.
“This is definitely one of the tools that the administration is trying to use to accomplish mass deportations, because it gets around all the procedural protections that people have in immigration courts and it allows them to remove people very quickly,” she said.
Fast-track deportations threatens U.S. citizens, long term-immigrants
Opponents of the expansion to expedited removal warn that a mass deportation campaign that isn’t bound by due process could catch far more people than the recently arrived unauthorized immigrants the policy purports to target, and result in the expulsion of legal permanent residents, immigrants with decades in the country — and even U.S. citizens.
In fact, in Arizona, people without legal status who have lived in the country for fewer than 10 years are in the minority. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that around 273,000 immigrants who lack any kind of legal authorization call the Grand Canyon State home, and 72% of them have lived in the country for at least a decade. And a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security found that about 250,000 Arizonans are legal permanent residents.
The expedited removal process is likely to lead to unjustified deportations because of how swiftly they’re carried out, and how nebulous its protocols are, Marcus said. Removals happen quickly, and the detained person must prove they don’t meet the criteria for expedited removal — but with little time given for them to gather proof of their long-term residency. In 2018, the average number of days a person spent in custody before being deported under expedited removal proceedings was 11.4, compared to the 51.5-day average for a person in regular removal proceedings that same year.
And, Marcus noted, there isn’t any current legal standard detailing what kind of proof is sufficient for a person to be safe from expedited removal. That’s left up to the arresting officer to decide.
“The burden is on the individual to convince the officer,” she said. “But there’s no provision in the statute or regulations for any process for that or for any timeframe.”
Marcus questioned whether the two-year requirement in the 2019 policy means that immigrants must present records for every month, and pointed out that would be a high bar for U.S. citizens to meet, let alone undocumented people who may live with a fake identity or have official documents, like leasing contracts and utility bills, in a spouse or other legal relative’s name.
“I think if I were stopped out and about, I would not be able to show that I have continuously been present for the last two years,” Belous echoed. “Not many people go around with two years of pay stubs or rental records or documents like that.”
Racial profiling could result in U.S. citizens and immigrants who ordinarily wouldn’t be subject to expedited removal being deported. And while expedited removals were previously limited to areas near the border, expanding the policy’s reach to the rest of the country increases the likelihood that people will be detained based on what they look like.
“The fact of the matter is that it’s much more likely that an officer who’s looking to detain undocumented people is going to focus on people that they consider are of foreign appearance,” Marcus said. “Hispanic appearing people are more likely to be wrongfully removed from the country around this provision because they’re the ones more likely to be questioned about their status.”
Across the country and in Arizona, Hispanic people experience racial bias in interactions with law enforcement. An analysis of 2017 and 2018 traffic stops conducted by officers with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office found that Black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be arrested than white drivers, and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be given tickets than non-Hispanic drivers. That discrimination would likely translate into the rate at which Hispanic people are questioned by immigration officers. Belous pointed out that increasing the number of people immigration officials can scrutinize heightens the likelihood of erroneous deportations.
“As this policy expands across the nation and you have more and more encounters with law enforcement and immigration enforcement, there’s certainly a much higher risk that folks will get swept into this who shouldn’t be,” she said.
There’s already some new evidence of just that occurring during Trump’s first week in office, and ample historical examples. On Jan. 23, an ICE raid in Newark, New Jersey, resulted in the detainment of a U.S. citizen who is a military veteran. In 2008, a North Carolina man with mental disabilities was coerced by immigration officials into signing a statement saying he was from Mexico, despite not having any Mexican heritage, and was later deported and forced to live on the streets of Mexico for months. And in the Grand Canyon State, the infamous 2010 “show me your papers law” allowed local enforcement officials to engage in racial profiling to enforce immigration law before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the bulk of the law.
Reports are emerging that immigration officials are wrongfully detaining Native American people in Arizona and elsewhere. Navajo tribal leaders and one state lawmaker have sounded the alarm over indigenous Arizonans being detained and questioned by immigration officials about their citizenship status.
April Ignacio, the co-founder of progressive group Indivisible Tohono and a member of the Tohono O’odham nation, which has tribal lands on both sides of the Arizona-Mexico border, said that the expansion of expedited removals puts Native Arizonans who live in urban areas like Phoenix and Tucson at risk of racial profiling — a reality Native people living close to the border have had to deal with for decades.
“Not only does this impact tribal sovereignty, it’s racial profiling. It’s basically giving them a green light to racially profile any brown person, any ethnic looking person to ask for papers,” she said, adding: “These new policies are highlighting how Natives are part of this gray area.”
Ignacio said that she expects the issues with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda to continue impacting Native Arizonans. The state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes and about 461,000 people who identify as indigenous, the third-largest Native American population in the country.
“The training that Border Patrol gets already is not enough to understand the legalities of tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law. To me, it feels like the noodle test, when you throw it against the wall to see what sticks,” she said of the White House’s aggressive approach to immigration policy. “The new administration is doing everything they can, legally and illegally, to see what’ll stick.”
Few ways out for those stuck in expedited removal proceedings
Marcus said that there are few options left for people who are threatened with expedited removal to avoid deportation if they aren’t able to convince immigration officials that they shouldn’t be subject to the policy. One avenue is for a person to express a fear of severe harm if they’re returned to their country of origin and request an asylum application.
A high percentage of recent immigrants in the U.S. fled from violence in their home countries. A 2024 report from the University of Michigan found that as much as 73% of immigrants from Central and South America surveyed who arrived in the previous two years experienced some form of violence before deciding to travel to the U.S. and nearly half of respondents were victims of gun-related threats.
But the asylum process in the U.S. is subject to intense scrutiny. Any asylum application or fear claim made by immigrants in removal proceedings is tested in a strict screening process conducted by immigration officials. And while the person in custody can request a judicial review, under expedited removal, that review is quick and the judge relies on the screening official’s documentation to decide whether the deportation order should be waived.
Another option for undocumented people to avoid deportation is by seeking a cancellation of removal. To qualify, a person must prove they’ve been in the country for at least 10 years, have a U.S. citizen spouse or minor child who would experience an extreme level of hardship without them, and show a track record of good moral character. Under that route, the person could also apply for permanent residency, foregoing any future deportation threats.
But that has a long wait list: While nearly two-thirds of the country’s 11 million undocumented people are estimated to be eligible for legal status, federal law only allows the approval of 4,000 applications a year. Some applicants remain in the queue for years.
In the end, Marcus said, expedited removal serves primarily to facilitate deportations, at the expense of rights that everyone in the country, regardless of their citizenship status, is entitled to.
“It makes it easy to remove a person without due process,” she said. “It makes it much easier to remove any person from the country without them having a chance to go in front of a judge and have their case heard.”
Future outlook
Belous said the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which provides free legal services to people in federal immigration detention in Arizona as well as unaccompanied minors in legal custody, anticipates an increase in people needing access to legal help. Even before the expansion was approved by the Trump administration, the group had already seen a number of unwarranted deportations.
“The huge scope of this change can’t be overemphasized,” she said. “This went from a program that was very close to the border for a very limited amount of time to the entire country and a huge increase in that time — from 14 days to 2 years. This is going to affect a lot of people.”
While immigrant rights organizations are gearing up to protect undocumented people, advocacy groups are hitting back at Trump’s border hawk agenda in the courts. A federal judge in Washington on Jan. 23 blocked Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship via an executive order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
And on Jan. 22, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of immigrant advocacy organization Make the Road New York challenging the White House’s expansion of expedited removals, days before the order was made official shortly after the Trump administration issued a notice that it would oversee the policy change. In 2019, the duo was one of several organizations that won a court-ordered freeze of Trump’s first attempt to expand the scope. The policy was only implemented for three months before the Republican’s first term as president ended.
The new lawsuit asks a federal court to declare the renewed expansion unconstitutional, nullify it and revert the expedited removal policy back to its previous limits of applying only to unauthorized immigrants found within 100 miles of the border and with fewer than 14 days of documented presence in the country.
And while federal immigration officials could still carry out a mass deportation campaign across the country and in Arizona, it’s cooperation from local law enforcement officials that could significantly ramp up that effort. And some Democratic elected leaders at the statewide and local levels have so far signaled opposition to supporting such a campaign.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and Governor Katie Hobbs have both vocally criticized Trump’s promise to implement mass deportations. Mayes has also vowed to oppose the creation of detention camps for undocumented people and minors. And Phoenix, the state’s largest urban center that’s home to more than 250,000 undocumented people, has policies on the books dating back to Trump’s first presidency that bar the conscription of city police officers for any federal deportation force.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.