A federal appeals court on June 23, 2026, allowed Donald Trump’s government to expand deportations accelerated across the entire United States, turning a tool once used near the border into a nationwide procedure. Under the ruling, ICE and CBP can move to expel people who cannot show two consecutive years of residence in the country.
The decision matters because deportation accelerated is not a courtroom process. It is an administrative removal under Section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, with ICE officers signing the order and no hearing before an immigration judge. For people now swept into the rule, the change is not theoretical: the place where they are found no longer limits how far the government can reach.
The timing also explains why the search around deportation is spiking today. The ruling came on June 23, 2026, after a January 21, 2025, DHS instruction ordered expedited removal used to the fullest extent the law allows. That directive triggered two lawsuits brought by Make the Road New York, LUPE, We Count!, and the National Immigration Law Center, all aimed at stopping a broader federal use of the measure.
What the court allowed, though, is narrower than the government’s public posture might suggest. The law lets the secretary of Homeland Security decide where and when expedited removal is applied, but not who can be subjected to it. That distinction matters because the legal threshold has not changed: the rule still turns on whether a person can prove two continuous years in the country, even as the government is now free to apply it far beyond the 100-mile border zone used in earlier years.
That is the friction at the center of the ruling. The federal government had already tested the power in limited form in 2002 and 2004, then Trump’s first administration tried to broaden it in 2019 before the Biden administration rolled that expansion back in March 2022. Now the appeals court has reopened the wider reading, and the next fight is likely to be over how far ICE and CBP push it in practice, and whether the lawsuits can still force limits on its use.
For now, the most consequential part of the decision is simple: deportation accelerated is no longer confined to the border in the way it once was. The unresolved question is not whether the tool exists, but how aggressively it will be deployed before the legal battle catches up.
