A federal appeals court handed the Trump administration a major immigration enforcement win Monday, ruling 2-1 to revive the president's nationwide expedited removal policy and vacating a lower court order that had kept it on ice for months.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that challengers to the policy were unlikely to succeed on their claims that expanded expedited removal violates constitutional due process protections. The ruling clears the way for DHS to resume fast-track deportations of eligible illegal immigrants found anywhere in the country, not just near the border.

The decision reverses a nationwide stay imposed by U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, who had found the policy created a significant risk that individuals could be wrongly deported before having a meaningful opportunity to prove they were exempt. Judge Justin Walker authored the majority opinion. Judge Robert Wilkins dissented.

What the policy does, and why it was blocked

Expedited removal allows immigration officers to deport individuals without a hearing before an immigration judge if they were not lawfully admitted or paroled into the United States and cannot show they have continuously lived in the country for at least two years. Newsmax reported that the authority, originally limited since 1996 to within 100 miles of a land border and 14 days of entry, was first expanded nationwide by the Trump administration in 2019.

The Biden administration rescinded that expansion. DHS reinstated it shortly after Trump returned to office in January 2025, issuing a directive on January 21, 2025, that applied expedited removal to the maximum extent Congress authorized.

Judge Cobb then blocked the policy with a nationwide stay. Her ruling joined a pattern of Biden-appointed judges intervening against Trump immigration enforcement actions, a pattern that has drawn sharp criticism from the right.

The appeals court saw it differently.

The majority's reasoning

Walker, writing for the two-judge majority, framed the administration's move as a straightforward exercise of statutory authority. As Fox News Digital reported, Walker wrote:

"DHS thereby exercised its discretion to apply its expedited-removal authority to the maximum extent allowed by law."

The core legal dispute centered on whether DHS must proactively tell individuals facing expedited removal about the two-year continuous-presence rule, the threshold that, if met, would exempt them from the fast-track process. Make the Road, the organization challenging the policy, argued that failing to provide this information denied due process.

Walker rejected that argument in pointed terms:

"The constitutional requirement is notice of the action the government is taking and the grounds for it, plus an opportunity to respond. It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail."

He went further, noting the logical endpoint of the challengers' position. If the government must inform every person of the two-year rule, Walker wrote, it would presumably also have to explain "every other basis for contesting expedited removal." Make the Road, he said, offered "no limiting principle and identifies no authority for so expansive a requirement."

The majority also addressed evidence in the record that some individuals had been erroneously subjected to expedited removal despite having lived in the country for more than two years. The court acknowledged this but drew a sharp line between individual enforcement errors and the legality of the policy itself:

"To be sure, the record contains evidence that some aliens have been erroneously subjected to expedited removal despite having been present for more than two years. If so, that's illegal. But the cause there would be individual officers' failure to follow the law, not defects in the written directives under review."

That distinction matters. The court refused to strike down a lawful policy because of isolated mistakes in its application, a principle that, if abandoned, could be used to invalidate virtually any enforcement program.

The dissent and the ACLU's response

Judge Wilkins, in dissent, argued the procedures were inadequate:

"DHS is using procedures that do not allow a meaningful opportunity for noncitizens to demonstrate that they have been continuously present in the United States for two years."

The ACLU echoed that concern. Anand Balakrishnan, a senior staff attorney for the organization, told the Associated Press that the administration's push for fast-track deportations "will subject people to an unfair and error-prone system."

But the majority's reasoning leaves little room for that objection to gain traction on remand. The court found that Congress gave the executive broad authority to apply expedited removal, and that DHS's written directives are lawful on their face. The fact that both judges in the majority were appointed by Trump will no doubt fuel complaints from the left about judicial politics, but the opinion rests on statutory text, not partisan preference.

DHS celebrates, and sends a message

DHS General Counsel James Percival wasted no time claiming the win. In a statement to Fox News Digital, Percival said:

"For years, DHS has arbitrarily limited expedited removal to 14 days even though it applies to illegal aliens who entered the country illegally within the last two years. Today, the D.C. Circuit vindicated our decision to apply the law as written. It's not too late to take a $2,600 check and a free flight home!"

The reference to a "$2,600 check and a free flight home" suggests DHS is coupling enforcement with some form of voluntary departure incentive, though the details of that program were not spelled out in the ruling or in Percival's statement.

What is clear is the administration's posture: enforce the statute as written, and make the consequences of illegal entry swift and certain. That approach has already produced results at the border, where CBP data shows a sustained enforcement streak with zero releases over a period of thirteen consecutive months.

Part of a broader legal tide

The expedited removal ruling did not arrive in isolation. The Washington Times reported that the Trump administration secured multiple immigration victories across all three levels of the federal court system in a single week. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that legal immigrants facing unresolved criminal charges who leave and re-enter the U.S. can be placed in legal "parole" limbo, making them easier to deport upon conviction. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, warning that "the court has now handed the government a massive blank check."

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Texas approved a consent decree permanently nullifying Biden's Administrative Closure Rule, a policy that had allowed immigration judges to delay rulings in hundreds of thousands of deportation cases, effectively letting migrants remain in the country indefinitely. That rule was a hallmark of the Biden-era approach: don't deport anyone if you can avoid it, and use procedural delay as a substitute for amnesty.

Taken together, these rulings dismantle much of the legal architecture that immigration advocates and Biden-era officials built to slow or block enforcement. The courts are increasingly siding with the plain text of immigration statutes, and against the creative legal theories that kept those statutes from being applied.

The broader fight over ICE's detention authority continues to work its way through the courts as well. A recent appeals court deadlock over ICE mandatory detention has sent that question toward the Supreme Court, where it could produce yet another definitive ruling on the scope of federal immigration enforcement power.

And the high court has already signaled its willingness to engage. It recently took up a case that could settle whether ICE can hold criminal immigrants without bond hearings, a question with direct implications for the kind of rapid enforcement the expedited removal ruling now permits.

What comes next

Several questions remain unanswered. The full case name and docket number of the D.C. Circuit ruling were not specified in available reporting. The identity of the third panelist, the second member of the majority, has not been publicly named. And it is unclear whether the ruling takes immediate effect or whether further proceedings before Judge Cobb could delay implementation.

Make the Road could seek rehearing en banc before the full D.C. Circuit or petition the Supreme Court. Given the current composition of both courts, neither path looks especially promising for the challengers.

For DHS, the practical impact is significant. Expedited removal without a hearing before an immigration judge is the fastest tool in the enforcement toolkit. Applying it nationwide, rather than only within 100 miles of the border, means interior enforcement can move at the same speed as border enforcement. That was always the point of the statute. It just took this long for the courts to let the executive branch use it.

The Biden administration chose to shelve that authority. A Biden-appointed judge tried to block its return. And now a federal appeals court has said, plainly, that the law means what it says.

When the government enforces the statute Congress actually wrote, it turns out the courts have very little reason to stop it. That's not a radical proposition. It's how the system is supposed to work.