Immigrant arrests at courthouses signal new tactic in Trump’s deportation push

Masked officers descended on courthouses across the country this week and arrested stunned immigrants showing up for scheduled immigration hearings as part of a new directive from federal officials aimed at dramatically accelerating deportations.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Arizona, Virginia and more than 20 other states have been instructed to arrest people immediately after a judge has ordered them to be deported or after prosecutors move to drop their cases, according to internal documents issued this month and reviewed by the Washington Post.

The Trump administration is planning to then place immigrants whose cases are dismissed and who have been in the country less than two years into a fast-track removal process that does not involve a hearing before a judge.

The coordinated operation is the government’s latest attempt to quickly remove people from the country — even if officials have to bypass the courts — as concern grows in the White House that President Donald Trump won’t be able to fulfill his campaign promise to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem “is reversing Biden’s catch and release policy that allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens to be let loose on American streets,” department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”

In January, Trump signed an executive order to expand a process known as expedited removal to speed up deportations. The measure was created in a 1996 law that sought to crack down on illegal immigration. Migrants can request asylum from immigration officers if they fear persecution if returned home. But if they are denied, their only recourse is a cursory review by an immigration judge, not a full hearing.

Historically, expedited removals have been more commonly used at the border, but the Trump administration is expanding their use throughout the nation’s interior. The president made a similar attempt during his first term in 2019 but was stopped by a federal judge.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups filed a federal lawsuit in January in the District of Columbia seeking to block the latest expansion, saying it violates immigrants’ constitutional rights as well as other U.S. laws. They said asylum seekers “would get less due process contesting their deportation than they would contesting a traffic ticket.”

But as the case remains ongoing in court, Trump officials are moving forward with pushing through his effort to quickly arrest and deport immigrants. Department of Homeland Security attorneys in cities and states across the country this week moved to dismiss scores of deportation cases, saying people were free to go. But as soon as the immigrants left the courtrooms, a phalanx of federal law enforcement officers were waiting to handcuff them and take them to immigration detention.

In Phoenix, nearly two dozen masked federal law enforcement officers assembled in the parking garage of a U.S. office building and arrested men and women coming out of court as family members and others protested. Seattle attorneys were stunned when government lawyers filed motions to dismiss. In Chicago, plainclothes federal officers popped into courtrooms with lists of names, searching for their targets.

More than 30 immigration attorneys around the country said they witnessed their clients being apprehended in the mass dragnet, a process they said was unfair to people who were complying with the law by attending their court hearings and seeking legal immigration options.

San Diego immigration attorney Michael Hirman, who described himself as a Republican who voted for Trump, was in immigration court this week representing a client who said he had been a military commander in Venezuela. The man fled because he didn’t want to “gun down fellow Venezuelans in the street” and enforce draconian laws handed down by the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro, Hirman said.

The man entered the United States three days before Trump’s inauguration and immediately applied for asylum.

When government attorneys filed a motion to dismiss his client’s case — signaling they would stop their efforts to remove him from the country — Hirman thought that meant the Venezuelan was free to pursue his request for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a less adversarial process than in the courts. It felt like a small victory until about a dozen ICE agents approached them. It was the first time Hirman had ever had a client detained at court that way.

“My client went from hugging his family to being led away in handcuffs,” Hirman said.

He called the move a “sneaky new policy” that trapped people who had shown up for their court hearings in good faith — and whose lives are now at risk.

While some people may make false asylum claims, Hirman said, there is no doubt that his client “will be quietly removed from this world if returned to Venezuela.”

The Biden administration, which prioritized the deportation of criminals, dismissed tens of thousands of deportation cases because the immigrants were minors or adults seeking refuge, leaving them to search for another form of immigration relief. Biden officials also said officers generally should not arrest people in immigration courts, saying it could have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to show up for hearings and “impair the fair administration of justice.”

The American Immigration Lawyers Association has been tracking the enforcement actions to determine whether this fast-track procedure violates court rules and the rights of immigrants to appeal the termination of their cases. Greg Chen,the group’s senior director of government relations, said the administration’s undermining of the court process will produce immediate and long-term collateral effects.

“The Trump administration is pressuring judges in immigration courtrooms to function more like cogs in the mass deportation machinery rather than as fair and balanced arbiters of the law,” he said. “That is not the way Americans want and understand our judicial system to work. Immigration judges should be worried about this.”

Retired judge Jennie Giambastiani said that throughout her years working in Chicago’s immigration courts, arrests would occur only if someone was wanted in another court for a crime. Immigration courts are civil proceedings under the Justice Department. If the government seeks to terminate a deportation case there is little a judge can do, she said. ICE has the authority to place individuals in expedited removal and detention.

“It’s deeply disturbing and it seems unfair, but I think it is within DHS’s authority,” Giambastiani said. “The blindsiding of these people who appear in court, it’s heartbreaking and it’s not what I want this country to be, but this is what it’s turning into.”

Detaining people who are seeking lawful status is “just a cruel tactic to spread fear amongst the community,” said attorney Melissa Shepard with the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center. She said that although she expects the majority of her firm’s clients to continue going to court, there are thousands of people fighting their case pro se — representing themselves without an attorney — who could be discouraged. Missing a hearing could result in a deportation order.

Attorney Khiabett Osuna said she was in court Thursday when someone behind her asked for information about the case she was representing.

The man, whom she later identified as a plainclothes ICE agent, had a list he was checking and sat in the court gallery with the public, she said. Outside the courtroom, there were about a half dozen agents with laptops reviewing lists of names.

“It’s a whole operation,” she said.