A Biden-appointed judge named Jia Cobb decided the federal government had to personally tutor illegal immigrants on every possible legal defense before deporting them. On Monday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals told her that's not how any of this works.
The 2-1 ruling vacates Cobb's nationwide injunction and restores DHS's authority to fast-track deportations immediately.
The case centers on expedited removal — the policy allowing immigration officers to quickly deport illegal immigrants who weren't lawfully admitted and can't prove they've lived here continuously for at least two years. Trump first expanded it nationwide in 2019. Biden rescinded it. Trump reinstated it upon returning to office in January 2025. Judge Cobb blocked it again, arguing migrants faced "a substantial risk" of deportation before getting a "meaningful opportunity" to prove they were exempt.
Judge Justin Walker, writing for the majority on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dismantled that reasoning with surgical precision.
"The constitutional requirement is notice of the action the government is taking and the grounds for it, plus an opportunity to respond," Walker wrote. "It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail."
That distinction matters. Cobb's ruling essentially required DHS officers to act as defense attorneys for the people they were deporting — informing them of the two-year continuous-presence rule and any other basis for contesting removal. Walker called this what it is: an impossible standard with no limiting principle.
"If due process requires the government to inform individuals of the two-year continuous-presence rule, it presumably also requires informing them of every other basis for contesting expedited removal," Walker wrote. "Make the Road offers no limiting principle and identifies no authority for so expansive a requirement."
The challengers — the open-borders group Make the Road — pointed to cases where individuals were allegedly deported despite having been present for more than two years. The court acknowledged those cases might exist but refused to let individual officer errors invalidate the entire policy.
"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's the legal equivalent of saying a cop running a red light doesn't make traffic signals unconstitutional.
DHS General Counsel James Percival didn't miss the moment. "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," Percival said in a statement. "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!"
Judge Robert Wilkins dissented, arguing DHS procedures don't give migrants enough opportunity to prove continuous presence. "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," Wilkins wrote. The majority had already addressed this: due process requires notice and an opportunity to respond, not a government-funded tutorial on how to beat the system.
The broader pattern here is worth noting. Biden-appointed district judges have made a cottage industry of issuing nationwide injunctions against immigration enforcement — blocking policies that Congress authorized and the executive branch implemented. The appeals courts keep cleaning up the mess, but only after months of delay during which the blocked policies can't operate. Every month a bad injunction stands is another month of unenforced law.
As reported by Fox News, the ruling allows the Trump administration to immediately resume enforcement of nationwide expedited removal while the broader legal challenge continues.
Fourteen days. That's what the previous administrations limited expedited removal to — two weeks — when the statute clearly authorizes two years. Not because the law required it, but because enforcing immigration law at scale was apparently too much to ask. Now DHS applies the statute as written, a federal judge invents a constitutional right to free legal coaching, and an appeals court has to spend months explaining that the Constitution doesn't work that way.
The law said two years. DHS finally enforced two years. The court said that's fine.
Sometimes the system works exactly the way the people who wrote the law intended. It just takes a while to get past the people who didn't.
