The Biden administration has announced that it will further limit the ability of the nation’s immigration law enforcement officers to carry out their public safety mission by gutting the use of expedited removal, a critical enforcement tool that creates efficiency in immigration enforcement.
President Biden’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, blocked the Trump administration’s use of expedited removal in 2019 before being reversed by the D.C. Circuit. Should she be confirmed to the high court, there is every reason to believe Judge Jackson will side against the use of expedited removal and similar enforcement practices at every opportunity.
The Biden administration is making it clear, once again, that its goal is creating porous borders and undermining the job of law enforcement. The administration has done everything in its power to ensure that criminal aliens will go free in our communities and innocent Americans will suffer.
Expedited removal is a procedure by which an alien who has entered illegally, or has sought entry without proper documents or through fraud, can be removed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), without a formal removal proceeding. The authority has been in law for over a quarter of a century. In 2019, DHS issued a notice announcing that it would be exercising the full scope of its expedited removal authority under section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The result is that the important law can now be applied anywhere in the United States for any applicable alien who has not affirmatively shown, to the satisfaction of an immigration officer, that the alien has been physically present in the United States continuously for a period of at least two years immediately prior to the date of the determination of inadmissibility.
Prior to the notice, DHS applied its full expedited removal authority only to aliens who arrived by sea. But for aliens who arrived at a land border, expedited removal was limited to aliens who were encountered by an immigration officer within 100 air miles of the U.S. land border and who were continuously present in the United States for less than 14 days immediately prior to that encounter. The 2019 notice harmonized the use of expedited removal for aliens arriving by land with the existing use of expedited removal for aliens arriving by sea.
While details of the Biden administration’s anti-enforcement plan have not been made public, the forthcoming executive order is anticipated to either revert expedited removal policy back to the narrow prior version or prohibit the use of expedited removal in most cases altogether. Either way, the move is consistent with the Biden administration’s ongoing assault on immigration enforcement, which has resulted in a radical shift away from the rule of law.
Under the Biden administration, the American people have already witnessed the designation of most locations in American communities as “protected places” (i.e., sanctuaries) for criminal aliens, the extreme narrowing of arrest and removal guidelines for ICE officers (and the administration’s decision to hide the results of their policy by not issuing ICE’s annual report, which has been issued by every other administration for at least a decade), a massive increase in illegal immigration across the nation’s borders, the flying of illegal aliens to towns throughout the nation, a dramatic decrease in deportations, the near abandonment of cooperation with local law enforcement resulting in the release of dangerous criminal aliens, and the encouragement of welfare use by the foreign-born, just to name a few acts.