Sworn testimony from a recently fired immigration judge in Massachusetts is shedding new light on how the Trump administration’s deportation tactics are playing out on the ground, alleging “collusion” between immigration courts aggressively dismissing cases and ICE agents waiting to arrest migrants outside courtrooms.
George Pappas, a former immigration judge who was fired in July, provided the American Civil Liberties Union with a sworn statement for a case filed by a Brazilian immigrant with a legal status who was jailed anyway for a month and recently released. The testimony detailed how the assistant chief immigration judge in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, issued a directive to dismiss any case when requested by the Department of Homeland Security’s lawyers, paving the way for agents to arrest migrants outside of courtrooms.
The directive stemmed from a Department of Justice memo issued in late May, directing immigration judges to summarily dismiss all kinds of pending cases, resulting in the arrest of migrants who properly showed up for court appointments. It’s led to chaotic scenes in courthouse hallways, like the one in June in which federal agents forcefully detained New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as he tried to shield a migrant from law enforcement.
“It interferes with judicial neutrality and that interferes with due process and our responsibility to hold a fair hearing,” Pappas told NOTUS. “It’s collusion, yes. There’s supposed to be a firewall between DOJ and DHS.”
Immigration judges are not part of the independent judiciary — they work for the Department of Justice. If a DHS lawyer asks to dismiss a case orally and the judge quickly grants the request, migrants do not have the opportunity to respond. The strategy gives law enforcement agents a legal pretext to arrest migrants, because without an ongoing case, migrants can be subject to rushed deportation.
There’s legal reasoning behind this tactic: Expedited removals fall under 8 U.S. Code § 1225, which says that such removal orders are “not subject to administrative appeal.” From Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s point of view, it cuts any red tape — and pushes aside intervention by federal judges.
To Pappas, the “pressure and instructions were clear” that he needed to honor the DHS requests so they could speed up deportations.
“I responded and said, ‘Are you telling me to rubberstamp these motions?’” he recalled in court paperwork, adding that his supervisor directed him to proceed: “Unless it is defective — grant them.”
The Department of Justice, which runs the immigration courts, declined to comment. DHS declined to answer questions but asserted that the Brazilian young man at the center of the case was subject to an “expedited removal.”
In a statement, DHS said, “Most aliens who illegally entered the United States within the past two years are subject to expedited removals. Biden ignored this legal fact and chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, into the country with a notice to appear before an immigration judge. ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”
On Friday, a federal judge in New York referenced the tactic directly in a case involving Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, a Paraguayan man who showed up to immigration court in Manhattan on July 16 only to have a judge adjourn his hearing. He then encountered masked ICE agents in the hallway who knocked one of his sisters to the ground when they arrested him.
“In practice, [government agents] seem to be detaining some arbitrary portion of such individuals as they leave their regularly-scheduled immigration court proceedings. But treating attendance in immigration court as a game of detention roulette is not consistent with the constitutional guarantee of due process,” U.S. District Judge Dale Ho wrote in an opinion issued Friday.
Expedited removals are becoming a go-to tool for ICE agents ever since the Trump White House revamped the policy from the more limited interpretation of past presidential administrations to a new one that “restores the scope of expedited removal to the fullest extent authorized by Congress.”
From 2004 until 2022, this kind of fast-track deportation only applied to some migrants who were in the country for two weeks or less. Now, ICE agents can use it on some migrants who have been here up to two years.
There’s some evidence that ICE agents have been putting migrants into that high-speed pipeline even when they don’t fit the bill. Take the case of Jose Daniel Orellana Juarez, who fled gangs in Guatemala and has lived in Georgia and Massachusetts. He was arrested in May and given expedited removal orders even though he’s been in the United States since August 2022.
That’s why Pappas’ accusations could put the entire practice under a microscope. The case in Boston, over 21-year-old Vitor Lopes Ramiro’s expedited removal, raises new questions about the tactic, given that Lopes Ramiro had been previously granted “special immigrant juvenile status,” a protected designation that typically goes to kids who have been abused, abandoned or neglected by their parents.
That made it all the more unsettling when ICE arrested him as he showed up to the agency’s offices in Burlington, Massachusetts, locked him up at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility and put him in the queue for “expedited removal.”
“The ICE officers did not provide me with any explanation for why I was being arrested. I was shocked as they had asked me to come in just for a document requirement related to my case being closed. Now I know they lied to me,” Lopes Ramiro said in signed court papers.
Lopes Ramiro sued with the help of an immigration attorney and the Massachusetts ACLU, which pointed out that he couldn’t legally be subjected to a rushed deportation because an immigration judge had already given him a protected status and an asylum officer had already determined his “credible fear” of returning was legitimate.
But at the July 23 hearing, when a federal judge would hear arguments about his monthlong detention, lawyers with the Boston U.S. Attorney’s Office surprised everyone by declaring that DHS was ditching the expedited removal orders — and putting Lopes Ramiro right back into regular immigration deportation proceedings. Prosecutors handed defense lawyers a copy of the paperwork with a Sharpie line drawn across it.
“There’s been a development … if you will,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael P. Sady began.
“Well, that does change things a bit,” U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy said.
By early afternoon, the judge decided he’d let Lopes Ramiro out, calling the government’s sudden shift in gears “legally suspect.” And he made clear he was uncomfortable with the idea that ICE could just have Lopes Ramiro’s case dismissed — then put him right back into expedited removal.
“It occurs to me that this is a … situation that is capable of repetition,” Murphy said. “I’m wary of allowing that situation to play out.”
Daniel McFadden, the ACLU lawyer on the case, told NOTUS that the “rubberstamping” Pappas describes amounted to “a threat to the integrity of the court.”
“Judge Pappas’ declaration is highly concerning, because it suggests there has been improper pressure applied to the immigration court system to facilitate termination of proceedings in order to funnel people to expedited removal — and this is a phenomenon with nationwide implications,” he said.