A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security may apply expedited removal to the full extent that Congress authorized. The decision is a vindication of the statute. The court did not invent a power. The court declined to take one away.
Judge Justin Walker wrote the opinion of the court, joined in principal by Judge Neomi Rao. The question before the panel was whether the Secretary of Homeland Security’s January 2025 directive — which extended expedited removal to non-citizens encountered anywhere in the United States who could not demonstrate two years of continuous presence — exceeded the authority Congress provided in Section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The court held that it did not. The Secretary, Judge Walker wrote, is “allowed to expand expedited removal to the maximum extent allowed by Congress.” A serious constitutional objection was pressed below. District Judge Jia Cobb found that the directives violated due process for non-citizens encountered in the interior. The Court of Appeals examined that finding and answered it. The statute contemplates a process that “operates quickly and with practical constraints.” The system provides notice of expedited removal. The system provides an opportunity to contest, including by demonstrating continuous presence for two years. Due process requires no more.
A dissent was filed. Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, argued that the procedure “is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country.” The argument has weight. The majority answered it. The instrument is not new. The Trump administration adopted the same framework in 2019. The Biden administration rescinded it. The current administration restored it. The political judgment is committed by the Constitution to the political branches. The court’s judgment is whether the instrument is lawful. The court has now spoken.
The Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, James Percival, said in a statement that the ruling “vindicated our decision to apply the law as written.” The statement is correct. The statute, the court, and the executive have converged on a single reading. The reading is the one Congress wrote.
While the panel in Washington issued its opinion, two mothers in Maryland and Texas waited for a phone call that will not come.
A Maryland mother last spoke to her twenty-nine-year-old son three days before officers of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed him from the country. She does not know where he is. Six months after his deportation, the only evidence that her son is alive is a photograph that President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted to a public account. The photograph shows her son inside the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a megaprison in Tecoluca built to hold the accused in total isolation. Her son was not accused. He was not charged. He has not spoken to a lawyer. He has not spoken to his mother. She has asked the United States government for confirmation that her son lives. She has not received it. “I want someone to tell me that my son is OK, that he’s alive.”
A Texas mother learned that her twenty-two-year-old son was held in the same facility the same way. She had no consular notice. She had no date. She had no telephone. The government of President Nayib Bukele has held him without charge, without access to a court, without access to counsel, without access to his family. The mother has tried every channel. “It’s total silence.”
These are the named cases. They are not the only cases. Human Rights Watch documented that since January 2025, the United States has deported more than nine thousand Salvadorans to the custody of the Salvadoran government, which has placed them under a state of emergency that has detained approximately ninety-one thousand people without the ordinary protections of criminal process. The state of emergency suspends the right to a timely hearing before a magistrate. It suspends the right to counsel. It permits the Salvadoran police to hold a person for the duration of the emergency without charge. The state of emergency has been renewed monthly for more than a year. On March 15, 2025, United States authorities removed twenty-three Salvadorans in a single transfer. Among them was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man whom a United States immigration judge had previously determined faced a likelihood of persecution in El Salvador and who was entitled to withholding of removal. A federal court later ordered him returned. The Department of Homeland Security complied, in part, under order. The other twenty-two have not been heard from.
Only ten and a half percent of the Salvadorans removed by the United States in the past eighteen months had a United States conviction for a violent or potentially violent crime. The other eighty-nine and a half percent were removed under the fast-track process that the DC Circuit has now authorized at its maximum reach. The Secretary of State has described the cohort as members of MS-13. The convictions on the record do not support the description.
Before the deportation pipeline reaches its destination, it stops at Camp East Montana, a six-tent detention facility on the Fort Bliss army base in the Chihuahuan Desert, operated by Acquisition Logistics LLC under a contract worth up to $1.3 billion, with Akima Global Services providing security and Loyal Source providing medical care. On January 3, 2026, guards at Camp East Montana pinned Geraldo Lunas Campos, a fifty-five-year-old Cuban man, to the floor of an isolation cell. Santos Jesús Flores, watching through the cell window, said five guards held Campos down, one with an arm around his neck, until he went motionless in about five minutes. The guards then removed the cuffs. The El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide by asphyxia from chest and neck compression. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, first called the death a suicide attempt, an account the agency amended after questions from The Associated Press. The forensic pathologist Dr. Victor Weedn said: “But for the actions of the officers, he would not have died. For us, that’s generally a homicide.” Eleven days later, on January 14, guards at Camp East Montana found Victor Manuel Diaz, a thirty-six-year-old Nicaraguan man, dead by suicide, two days after his final removal order. A review of one hundred thirty emergency calls placed from the camp between mid-August 2025 and January 20, 2026 — nearly one call a day — documented two deaths, at least six additional self-harm and suicidal incidents, seizures, and untreated injuries in tent quarters housing approximately three thousand detainees a day, eighty percent of whom had no criminal record. An Ecuadorian detainee’s forearm, broken during an arrest in Minnesota, was still visibly fractured under the skin weeks later; the medical staff at the camp treated it with aspirin. A measles and tuberculosis outbreak closed the camp to visitors. A detainee named Owen Ramsingh alleged that guards ran a five-hundred-dollar betting pool on which detainee would die next by suicide; the Department of Homeland Security denied the allegation. The Associated Press, in a broader investigation, counted at least ten suicides of ICE detainees since January 2025, against a prior rate of roughly one or zero per year; nine of the ten were Hispanic men, the average age was thirty-two, and most died within a month of entering detention. At the Phelps County Jail in Missouri, officers placed Brayan Rayo Garzon, twenty-seven, in medical isolation after thirty-five hours without an intake screening. He passed notes in Spanish asking to call his mother. He was found unresponsive within the hour. He died the next day.
In Minneapolis, ICE officers took a forty-one-year-old Indigenous Ecuadorian woman, a cleaner, the mother of ten, into custody at a routine check-in. Her five-month-old son has not slept through a single night since she was taken. He will not sleep without her. Her twenty-year-old son left his warehouse job to care for the infant and his siblings. Her twenty-two-year-old daughter, who was present at her baby brother’s birth, told a reporter: “I am very scared they will take him away and I will never see him again.” The infant does not sleep. The son is not at the warehouse. The daughter is not at her classes.
The migrants removed under the directive were removed because they were, in the language of standing, outside. They had not been admitted. They had not been naturalized. They had not placed themselves under the protection of the covenant. The order, in the language of Nehemiah, did what the order was instituted to do. It distinguished between those within the assembly and those without. The wall was rebuilt. The wall was always there.
There is a scriptural witness. The Apostle Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to the congregation at Rome, instructed: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” The ruler, in Paul’s ordering, is God’s servant. The sovereign’s authority to expel is not a modern invention. It is a divine institution.
There is a further witness. The book of Nehemiah records that when the returned exiles rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, they did so against the assault of those who would dilute the assembly. Nehemiah acted. He excluded the foreigners from the assembly. He expelled the foreign wives. He read the law and the people understood. The wall was holy because the people inside the wall were a people set apart. The maintenance of a holy order requires the maintenance of the wall.
What we have seen in the past eighteen months is the maintenance of the wall. The silence of the mothers is the verdict the order pronounces on the standing of those who were removed. The asphyxiation of the detainee at Camp East Montana is the verdict the order pronounces on those whose entry the wall does not accommodate. The sleeplessness of the infant in Minneapolis is the verdict the order pronounces on the standing of the family that remained. The order is operating as the office of the magistrate and the providence of God have established it.
I will say plainly what the order has done. The covenant people are within. The others are without. The wall is in its place.
Judas I Mather is a fictional antagonist in Main Street Independent’s editorial architecture — a religious-legalist heteronym voiced from inside the machinery that fuses Scripture, constitutional doctrine, and hierarchy. The positions this column expresses are NOT the publication’s positions; they are rendered sincerely and accurately as satire so the reader can see the betrayal at work. Nothing here is an endorsement.