Category: Wires

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume using a fast-track deportation process throughout the country that is typically reserved for people apprehended shortly after crossing the southern border.

The decision revived a pillar of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, after a lower court ruled last August that attempts to use the procedure to potentially remove millions of people without immigration hearings most likely violated their due process rights and risked wrongful detentions.

In a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that it did not violate immigrants’ rights to use the policy to the maximum extent allowed by law. Judge Justin R. Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, also a Trump appointee. Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a dissent that he would have let the lower court’s ruling stand.

Writing for the majority, Walker wrote that Congress had delegated to the executive branch decisions about which migrants to designate for expedited deportations.

“For many years, while some were designated, others were not,” he wrote. “But that changed in January 2025 when the executive expanded expedited removal to the maximum extent allowed by Congress,” he wrote.

He added that the Homeland Security Department was not legally required to tell those arrested that they could avoid expedited removal if they could prove they had been in the country continuously for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” the opinion said.

Immediately upon taking office in January, Trump empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use the process, known as expedited removal, against an expanded population of immigrants lacking legal status.

Expedited removal had been used narrowly for migrants lacking legal status who are detained near the southern border. It allows officials to deport people who have been in the country for less than two years without hearings in immigration courts.

Trump’s expanded policy encouraged agents to detain and designate for rapid removal migrants questioned even deep in the country’s interior if they could not produce proof on the spot that they had been in the country beyond that two-year threshold.

But judges have been deeply skeptical of the policy, noting that throwing out immigrants’ rights to challenge their removal in court could lead to abuse when carried out at scale.

During a hearing last December, the three-judge appeals court panel focused on how immigration agents had used the policy in 2025 before it was blocked by a lower court. Judges pressed Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the government, for specifics.

The three judges questioned why the government had waited until October 2025 to share with the court a policy memo circulated at ICE last February, which explained how and when expedited removal should be used.

The guidance instructed agents that if someone apprehended by immigration agents professed to have been in the country longer than two years, they should be given “a brief but reasonable opportunity” to provide documentation to avoid being placed in expedited removal. Walker wrote in the opinion Tuesday that as long as migrants are provided that “reasonable opportunity,” the requirements of the law had been fulfilled.

In his dissent, Wilkins wrote that the Department of Homeland Security had not disputed that in using the policy, it had deported a number of individuals who had been in the country longer than two years.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” he wrote.

In a statement, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the ruling. He wrote that the department had long “arbitrarily limited expedited removal,” though the law allows it to be used more broadly.

He said the appeals court had “vindicated” the Trump administration’s practices.

Anand Balakrishnan, a lawyer representing Make the Road New York, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, argued during the hearing last year that such groups had been in the dark about how the procedure had been used. He said that the decision to give migrants lacking legal status an opportunity to state their case and avoid being placed into fast-track deportation was being made by individual agents with little oversight.

“I don’t have any clue how this process is supposed to work in practice, particularly when the only check on it is that individual officer who is supposedly, in their discretion, providing them with time,” he said.

Balakrishnan said the aggressive expansion of the policy effectively left everyone without full legal status vulnerable to being placed on a fast track for deportation, including those who had lived in the country for decades and had deep ties to their communities or to U.S. citizens.

But Balakrishnan had faced skeptical questioning from Rao and Walker. At one point, Walker appeared to dismiss the case as an attempt to stall the deportation process nationally, rather than maintain what had for decades been a more circumscribed use of the expedited removal process.

Walker observed that all of the people challenging the policy were in the country illegally.

“So whether they get expedited removal or nonexpedited removal, the proper result is removal, right?” he said.

“I don’t know whether the proper result is removal,” Balakrishnan said. “I mean, the proper result would be procedures to access the relief that Congress has afforded them.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Crews began dismantling a state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades on Monday, signaling its closure even as state and federal officials continued to say little about the shutdown of a year-old facility that they once praised on a near-daily basis.

State officials informed vendors in a call Monday morning that they could begin “demobilizing,” or taking down, the tents, fences, trailers, and other structures at the detention center, known as Alligator Alcatraz, according to three people familiar with the call. Vendors are supposed to make significant progress on the work by Wednesday, two of the people said.

The directive came days after the Department of Homeland Security said that all detainees had been transferred out of the remote center, which opened a little less than a year ago to much fanfare from President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, his fellow Republican.

“As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility,” the department said in a statement last Tuesday, referring to the detention center. “For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities.”

Last year, however, thousands of detainees spent the bulk of hurricane season at the center, which became the nation’s first state-run facility to hold federal immigration detainees. The tropical storm season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.

Immigration lawyers and activists took last week’s statement from DHS as the latest evidence that the facility would soon close.

On Friday, Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management chief, whose agency operates the center, insisted that it remained open. “At this point in time, we have not been told to stand down, so we are still in a posture to receive detainees,” he told reporters, according to the Miami Herald.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Monday morning’s call between state officials and the detention center’s vendors was first reported by CBS Miami.

The New York Times first reported last month that federal and state officials were considering closing the facility, which has cost Florida hundreds of millions of dollars to operate, by June.

When asked about a closure since then, DeSantis has said that the Homeland Security Department is reassessing its detention needs now that Markwayne Mullin is in place as the agency’s new secretary. The agency plans to sell or give away most of the 11 warehouses it bought to detain immigrants, the Times reported last week.

On Monday, DeSantis’ office referred questions about the center to the emergency management division. James Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general who was instrumental in opening the center, said Monday that he could not confirm if it was closing, though he knew that the number of detainees had been dropping.

“Alligator Alcatraz actually stayed open longer than it was intentionally planned,” he said at a news conference in Tampa. “It was never expected to be a long-term thing.”

To many who have closely followed the center over the past year, the inconsistent messaging about whether it is closing — and, if so, for what reason — has left the impression that Alligator Alcatraz, with its hefty price tag and ongoing reports of troubling conditions, has become too much of a political liability.

“It’s been an expensive failure,” said Jeff Brandes, a Republican and former state senator who now runs the Florida Policy Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “Nobody would say this was a success.”

The facility has cost state officials more than $1 million per day to operate, including for trucking in water and trucking out wastewater. The federal government had committed to pay the state more than $600 million to defray costs, but it has provided only a fraction of that amount so far.

This year, Florida lawmakers imposed new rules on the emergency fund that the state has been using to cover the center’s operating costs. Those rules take effect July 1, the start of Florida’s new budget year.

State officials hastily erected the detention center on a training airport about halfway between Miami and Naples, hailing it as the showcase of Florida’s cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown. They also erected an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign on a road leading to the facility, ignoring criticism that the moniker — and jokes they made about any escapees being intercepted by alligators — was cruel.

Detainees, their relatives, and their lawyers have regularly denounced what they have described as unsanitary and inhumane conditions at the center, allegations that state officials deny. Environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the state and the federal government, arguing that the facility was illegally constructed in sensitive wetlands.

Last week, after Homeland Security officials said that detainees had been moved out, a lawyer for the environmental groups vowed to continue the lawsuit over what he called the “secret Gulag in the Everglades.”

“They hope that they can slink away in the middle of the night without explaining to anyone what they did, why they did it, or how they proposed to clean up the mess that they’ve made,” the lawyer, Paul J. Schwiep, said at a virtual news conference Wednesday. “And we don’t intend to let them get away with it.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

At least 40 people have drowned in France over the last five days as the country endured a scorching heat wave, Sébastien Lecornu, the country’s prime minister, said at an emergency cabinet meeting Tuesday.

Most of the drowning victims were young, many of them teenagers, and swimming in unsupervised areas. Lecornu called the drownings a “tragic scourge.”

Marina Ferrari, a minister whose responsibilities include young people, said in an interview on French radio Tuesday that the drownings were mostly in bodies of water such as lakes or canals.

“During heat waves like this,” she said, “it’s no small matter to go swimming in areas that aren’t supervised.”

France is in the middle of an intense heat wave over much of Europe that began in the middle of last week. Forecasters have said that Paris could hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit this week, not far from its record. Parts of central France could see highs of around 109 degrees F.

More than half of the country is under a red alert for heat wave conditions, the most severe. France’s weather agency, Météo-France, said it expected “exceptionally high temperatures, both day and night.” The temperatures have the potential to have a “strong health impact.”

“All the records, locally or nationally, are being broken every day or night when it comes to temperatures,” Lecornu said.

From Monday to Tuesday, France recorded its hottest night since measurements began in 1947, Météo-France said. An average of readings from 30 stations across France reached almost 71 degrees F, according to preliminary figures.

The current heat wave in Europe is the result of a heat dome, a strong area of high pressure that allows heat to build over a region.

According to Météo-France these stubborn, high-pressure systems can block or divert passing weather fronts, leading to conditions with few clouds and little rainfall.

For France, this is the second heat wave in about a month, after record-breaking temperatures in May.

The high temperatures have also caused other fatalities over the last few days. BFMTV, a French news station, reported the deaths of two children, ages 2 and 4, who were left inside a car on Monday.

In Paris on Tuesday, dozens of people sought relief from the heat, swimming in the canal Saint-Martin to avoid their hot apartments.

Martina Russo, 28, said she was not very worried about the risk of drowning. She said she was more worried about the quality of water. “It would be nice to have someone say, ‘We’ve tested it, and there are no health risks,’” she said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Iran is taking steps to cement its control over the Strait of Hormuz and to generate revenue from the waterway through new entities and procedures, experts say. The moves come even as negotiations with the United States and Iran’s neighbors over managing the vital waterway are taking place.

The head of Iran’s primary insurance regulator, Mousa Rezaei, said Sunday that a new insurance company had been established that was dedicated solely to the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian state media reported. And late last week, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which was created by Iran in May, demanded that vessels register and sign up for a new mandatory Iranian insurance policy — free of charge for now.

Shipping experts see these steps as an attempt to assert Iranian control over the whole waterway, which it shares with Oman. They appear to be a prelude to Iran’s demanding payments from vessels that once transited without fees or need of its assent, the experts say.

The Iranian requirements could set a dangerous precedent for global shipping, experts say, and they are already making a confusing situation in the strait much more so.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said Richard Meade, editor-in-chief of Lloyd’s List, a shipping news service, in an interview Monday.

The Persian Gulf Strait Authority did not respond to a request for comment.

The insurance demands emerged after the United States and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to end the war and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz last week. That agreement left discussion of difficult issues — including management of the strait — to further talks. And Oman, Iran, and other Gulf nations “will figure out a proper security framework for the straits in the future,” Vice President JD Vance said last week.

But the Iranian demands try to legitimize the authority of the new entity as those broader negotiations are underway, said Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian and former merchant marine who hosts the YouTube show What’s Going On With Shipping?

The free insurance period passes after 60 days, which is the length of the initial ceasefire agreement between Iran and Washington and the period that the initial deal guarantees free passage. After that, Iran could then demand vessels pay for insurance through its new dedicated strait insurance company, Mercogliano said, collecting payment for risks that did not exist until Iran began attacking ships.

The new insurance Iran is offering protects against things like risk of attack and the detention of mariners, issues that experts say Iran created after the United States and Israel attacked the country in February and it retaliated by striking commercial vessels.

Iran weaponized the waterway by making it too dangerous for businesses, experts say.

Mercogliano said in an interview that the new administrative procedures took this Iranian weaponization a step further. He compared the insurance requirement to the mafia’s demanding protection money or someone trying to sell flood insurance “while they control the gates above the dam.”

The new Iranian insurance also raises legal questions. Under international law, a toll for mere passage through the strait would be illegal, though charging fees for services — tugging or waste disposal, for example — could be legal.

Since March, Iran has floated the notion that it will charge ships in the strait, characterizing the payments as services without specifying what it would offer and raising international alarm. Last month, it was in talks with Oman about the proposition.

But simply calling something a “service” is not enough to transform an illegal toll into a legitimate request for payment for services, maritime lawyers say.

The Persian Gulf Strait Authority’s insurance demand “effectively sidesteps” the agreement between the United States and Iran and paves the way for Iran to demand fees in the future, Meade said.

“This is effectively a toll by another name,” he said.

A spokesperson for the International Maritime Organization told the New York Times that the insurance requirement published by the authority “has not been officially submitted to IMO and is not part of any official process or record.”

The spokesperson said the right of ships to transit through the passage “cannot be suspended or hampered by coastal states” and that there was “no established basis in international law” that allowed mandatory tolls or fees. She did not, however, rule out “cooperation mechanisms to assist in managing a strait” between states.

The new insurance requirement also raises practical questions for shippers and vessels. By having to pay to mitigate risks from Iran, businesses could find themselves in trouble with the United States.

The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Persian Gulf Strait Authority in late May. The United States called the entity a new attempt by Iran “to monetize its campaign of state-sponsored terror by extorting vessels,” and Treasury officials warned against paying the authority, saying that those who did do so could be subject to sanctions.

Iran is also under a number of different sanctions from the United States, Britain, the European Union, and the United Nations. While lifting the sanctions has been discussed as part of a broader deal related to Iran’s fulfilling commitments to end its nuclear program, at this stage, registering for Iranian war-risk insurance is itself a potential risk.

In light of the confusion about navigating the strait, shippers are in “purgatory,” stuck between a past that cannot be revived and a future that remains unclear, Meade said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.