(Bloomberg) -- The White House denounced a federal judge's decision to halt President Donald Trump's administration from expediting deportations of people who entered the U.S. illegally.
“Once again, a single district judge has suspended application of Federal law nationwide -- removing whole classes of illegal aliens from legal accountability,” the White House said in a statement Saturday.
U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a ruling late Friday in Washington, halted the enforcement of a policy that widened the “expedited removal” program. Before the policy was announced in July, only migrants caught within 100 miles of the border who illegally had entered within two weeks were allowed to be deported.
Read more: Trump's Attempt to End Protection for Migrant Kids Fails
In granting a halt to the tougher rules, Jackson argued there's a risk that they would subject some people to “speedy and erroneous deportation, given the scale of the expansion of expedited removal from its previous scope.”
Hours earlier, the administration's attempt to end a 22-year-old agreement that limits how long migrant children can be held in detention was stymied when a federal judge in Los Angeles denied the government's request.
The Department of Homeland Security “failed to address significant flaws in the expedited removal system” and apparently didn't consider “the potential impact of the expansion of that system on settled undocumented non-citizens and their communities,” Jackson said in the ruling.
The White House argued that “misguided lower court decisions” are preventing full enforcement of a 1996 law allowing “expedited removal of illegal aliens within two years of their arrival” in the U.S.
To contact the reporter on this story: Hailey Waller in New York at hwaller@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Tony Czuczka, Linus Chua
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