As Trump vows to end asylum, a tech bro site valiantly defends him -- from accusations that he wants to end asylum

An editor at the "anti-woke" site Pirate Wires scolds me for criticizing Trump's immigration policy. He has no idea what he's talking about.

Patriotic American Stephen Miller (Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

One of the more frustrating dynamics of the Trump era is being called hysterical for warning that the president would do exactly what he has said he would do. There was a lot of this before the 2024 election, as anti-anti Trumpers lectured those of us worried about authoritarianism that Trump is all bluster, or that our institutions would hold, or that he would be too incompetent to carry out his worst campaign promises.

You’d think that the last nine months would have shut those people up. Alas, no.

About a week ago, a reader sent me this article from a site called Pirate Wires. The author is an editor there named Harris Sockel. The headline: “Ezra Klein Doesn’t Understand How Immigration Works.”

Sockel’s beef is actually with me, not Ezra Klein. He’s mad about something I said on Klein’s New York Times podcast last month. But Klein is much more famous than I am, so it’s his name in the headline.

But here’s the subhead:

“ezra klein, radley balko, and the new york times claim ice is ‘eviscerating’ due process, but a close look at immigration law reveals they're wrong.”

(The cool, anti-establishment all-lower case copy is in the original.)

As I read through Sockel’s attempt to educate me about immigration law, I saw a lot of familiar arguments — arguments that don’t happen to be true but also take a lot of time and effort to debunk. By his own description, Sockel appears to have taught himself immigration law in about a week after he saw my interview. Meanwhile, I have spent quite a bit longer studying this issue — and still don’t claim to be an expert. Nevertheless, I do know enough to explain why he’s wrong. And given the abuses we are seeing every day, it seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight about what this administration is actually doing.

To understand why Sockel is wrong on both the relevant laws and their application, we need look more generally at what we mean when we talk about due process.

“Due process” does not mean “legal.” It might. But it often doesn’t. The Soviet Union’s show trials were legal under Soviet law. They didn’t offer much in the way of due process. A law can be unfair, unjust, and deny any reasonable definition of due process, but still be legal.

There’s also a common phenomenon when people debate the constitutionality of laws or government actions in which one side makes a normative argument while the other makes a legal one. So they end up talking past one another. For example:

Civil libertarian: “This new Texas law banning abortion is unconstitutional!”

Very smart guy: “You are factually incorrect and don’t understand law. The Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization that the Constitution permits a state to prohibit abortion. See 597 U.S. 215 (2022).”

The civil libertarian is not arguing that states can’t ban abortion under current Supreme Court precedent. She’s making a normative argument about what she believes to be constitutional. This distinction is increasingly important as the current Supreme Court continues to chip away at basic rights — like, say, the right to not be racially profiled, tackled, and beaten by masked, armed immigration agents looking to meet a quota. A policy can be deemed legal by the courts and still violate due process. Courts can be wrong about things.

The second thing we need to look at when we talk about due process is how the laws are actually enforced in the real world. Laws that aren’t necessarily violative of due process can be enforced in ways that are.

Both of these things — whether the law itself is just, and whether it’s being enforced in a just way — are part of due process.

When discussing Trump’s immigration policy, Sockel looks only at what the law says. (As we’ll see, he gets that wrong too.) He also doesn’t seem to know that the administration is violating immigration laws other than the one he quickly educated himself about. But more importantly, there’s ample and growing evidence that the way this administration is enforcing the law is violating due process rights. Sockel doesn’t grapple with or even mention any of that.

So this will be a two part-post. The first part looks at how Sockel and defenders of mass deportation misstate the law. The second part, which I’ll post soon, looks at how Sockel and others defending the administration ignore the illegal ways in which it is actually enforcing the law on the ground.

The heterodox shuffle

But first, you might be wondering, what is “Pirate Wires”? That was my question when I saw the article. Poking around, I learned that it’s become kind of a big deal on the so-called heterodox right. It’s run by Mike Solana, a vice president at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Solana has described Thiel as his mentor, and has a reputation as very online bomb thrower.

Solana is also the founder of something called “Hereticon,” an annual event inaugurated in January 2022, when a bunch of people who didn’t believe in masks risked getting Covid so they could listen to brave dissidents proclaim unspeakable truths on, for example, the merits of intelligent design, or how eugenics isn’t really all that bad. (I’m not exaggerating.) The following year, the event featured the influential monarchist, inspirer of JD Vance, and slavery apologist Curtis Yarvin.

Pirate Wires, it turns out, is another rich guy-backed platform for snide contrarians to complain about how people like them don’t have a platform.

Last year, The Atlantic described Solana and his publication as “a must-read among the anti-woke investor class—and a window into what the most powerful people in tech really think.” Solana himself recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic in which he made tired arguments about how the political left is unserious. For example, he accused the left of celebrating the murder of a Blackstone executive during the mass shooting in midtown Manhattan this past summer. His “prototypical post” was an Instagram post by a guy in Canada that had 43 “likes.” Naturally, Solana then wrote at his own publication about what it was like for a voiceless, no-platform rebel like him to write a piece for an elite, woke publication like The Atlantic.

Here’s Solana being interviewed by Reason last year on every tech bro’s favorite topic, “Can San Francisco Be Saved?” Here’s The Atlantic calling him “the most opinionated man in America.” Here’s Reason again, interviewing him in 2022 under the headline “Mike Solana Wants You To Commit Thoughtcrimes.” Here’s an interview he did with an extremely popular podcast in which he talks about “How woke people are destroying America,” and recommends Bari Weiss’s newsletter and a book by Scott Adams.

If only someone would amplify this poor man’s voice!

Pirate Wires headlines read like a Festivus declaration of white tech bro grievances. The top story a couple weeks ago was Solana’s defense of the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. Here’s a piece decrying anti-white discrimination. Here’s a lament about how Kyle Rittenhouse is the victim of “one of the most tyrannical smear and censorship campaigns in modern history.”

Here’s a piece about how calling people “Karen” threatens to “ruin the lives” of white women. Here they found an immigrant to complain about more recent immigrants’ refusal to assimilate. How original!

You get the idea.

I’ve written previously about the pompous self-righteousness of “heterodoxists.” This is the class of pundits and writers who bill themselves as the only true skeptics, immune to the trappings of tribalism, partisanship, and the status quo. In other words, they alone see the world as it really is.

Heterodoxists thrive on victimhood. They believe their truth-spitting to be so subversive and revolutionary that the legacy media refuses to platform them. This is why they take funding from billionaires to start their own publications — which are then glowingly written up by the legacy media.

The prototypical heterodoxist is the “follymath.” This my term for the guy (and it’s usually a guy) who believes his analytical skills are so intuitively precise that he can speak authoritatively on just about any topic after just a quick boning up. And not just authoritatively, but sneeringly and contemptuously, particularly when telling actual experts why they’re wrong. The most arrogant follymath is the one who has had some actual success in his own field, which he thinks is then transferable to any other field. Think Scott Adams. Bret Weinstein. Elon Musk.

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Just to be clear, sometimes experts really are wrong. Sometimes entire fields can be coopted by groupthink or ideology. Sometimes allegiance to a chosen field can silo experts off from considering other priorities or outside critiques.

The problem with heterodoxists is that they tend to be just as siloed as the people they criticize. They, too, are driven by ideology — the ideology of heterodoxy. They claim to be independent, nonpartisan thinkers, but they’re inevitably more vocal and strident when criticizing the left and left-leaning bureaucrats. So their advocacy primarily serves to elevate the right, especially on issues like crime, immigration, racial justice, gay and trans rights, and other cultural issues. One of their most defining characteristics is insisting that they have no affinity for the right while attacking the left. But they inevitably side with the right.

You’ll need a subscription to read the Pirate Wires stories I’ve linked above. Maybe they really are all brilliant dissections of leftist elitism. I’m not going to pay to find out.

What I do have is the full copy of Harris Sockel’s article accusing me of not understanding immigration law. And as heterodox screeds go, it’s typical — cocksure yet facile, as arrogant as it is uninformed.

So let’s get into it.

Instant expertise

Tucked under the subhead of Sockel’s piece is this quick and dirty summary of his thesis, which again is responding to my interview with Ezra Klein:

Claim: ICE is “eviscerating due process” when it arrests peaceful undocumented immigrants showing up to their court-scheduled hearings.

Fact-check: What ICE is doing is completely legal under a 29-year-old law (that many at the New York Times evidently haven’t read).

To be clear, my interview with Klein wasn’t really about immigration. It was about Trump’s use of the National Guard, his takeover of U.S. cities, and his consolidation of federal law enforcement. Sockel’s entire piece was inspired by a single exchange from an hour-long interview. I’ll also add here that the New York Times did a fact check of the interview. He apparently thinks we are all wrong. We aren’t.

Here’s how he begins:

Last week on his podcast, Ezra Klein interviewed Radley Balko, a Substack writer and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Balko argues Donald Trump is “building his own paramilitary force” and “eviscerating due process,” specifically in ordering ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are calmly showing up for their court-mandated hearings. Here’s Balko:

We are seeing suspensions of due process for people who are here and undocumented. We’re seeing people being arrested when they show up for their hearings, when they’re abiding by the law, doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

Ezra watches intently, mournfully, obviously concerned — and as I watched, I was concerned, too.

Why are undocumented people being yanked out of court? Ezra asks, and Balko replies:

The government is saying at these asylum hearings: ‘We’re going to dismiss the government’s case against this person.’ So at that point, the person is no longer someone who went through the proper channels to legally request asylum. At that point, they are now just someone who is undocumented and here without authorization. So now ICE is legally permitted to detain them and sweep them up because they’re no longer in the asylum process.

“As I understand it, that is legally dubious, to say the least,” says Balko.

Clips from this interview have been viewed by almost 800k people on YouTube and X; the podcast reached many more; one of the top comments on YouTube compares the U.S. to the Iranian dictatorship pre-revolution.

I don’t have a strong opinion on some random commenter’s comparison of the Trump administration to the Shah. What the administration is doing right now is pretty bad, and that’s more than enough for me.

Sockel clearly thinks it’s overwrought to be angry about how ICE has been treating people. I think it’s safe to say that this is because Sockel doesn’t have much to worry about. He needn’t worry about armed agents breaking into his home, arresting him, and sending him 600 miles away from his family to a crowded detention center where politicians have giddily suggested he might be eaten by alligators. He isn’t at risk of being slammed to the ground and detained at gunpoint because he speaks with an accent, has brown skin, or attended an ethnically-themed street festival. He’s not at risk of being held and denied water for 24 hours, or held incommunicado for three days, as has happened to people who were not only here legally, but were actually U.S. citizens.

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The Pirate Wires masthead. You aren’t allowed to see their eyes. Please don’t look into their eyes.

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Worrying about the harms inflicted on other people but unlikely to affect you personally is a form of empathy. And as we’ve all learned recently, there are few traits more despised in the tech community these days — or on the political right — than empathy.

(Unless you’re talking about tech innovators and venture capitalists, who not only deserve our empathy, but are the victims of a Marxist dehumanization campaign that’s worse than the Holocaust. Or something.)

But let’s get back to Sockel.

. . . I read up on U.S. immigration law and spoke with two immigration attorneys (one current, another former). I wanted to figure out what’s actually going on here, legally.

You may have noticed in the earlier excerpt that when Klein asked me what I thought about the courthouse arrests, I hedged a little. I said, “As I understand it.” And I’m pretty sure I actually added more hedging language that was edited out.

I hedged because unlike issues like policing, which I’ve covered for 20 years, I’m not an expert on immigration. When the first reports started coming out about Project 2025, and when Stephen Miller first started laying out his vision for mass deportations, it seemed clear to me that if he were reelected, Trump’s worst abuses would come under the rubric of immigration enforcement. There would also likely be a lot of overlap with policing. So I decided this was an issue I should cover.

Before I wrote my first piece in May of last year about what it would take to implement Trump’s mass deportation plan, I spent a few months researching the issue. In the time since, I’ve spoken to dozens of immigration experts, including attorneys all over the country, many of whom I’ve met in person.

Even so, I still wasn’t confident enough with my own familiarity with immigration law to offer an off-the-cuff-opinion without first acknowledging that I might be wrong. (I wasn’t wrong.)

Again, Sockel seems to have taught himself immigration law in the week between the Times’s publication of my interview and his post claiming to correct it. He did this, he writes, by “reading up” — and by interviewing one current and one former immigration attorney.

This is the follymath’s superpower. With just plain common sense and an anti-establishment ethos, the follymath can jet across the learning curves we mere mortals have to navigate before understanding complicated issues. The heterodoxist need only stumble upon a passage that tickles his skeptic nerve. A few Wikipedia articles, half an Adderall, and a Red Bull later, he’s ready to unleash his wisdom upon the world.

Here’s what I learned: Radley Balko is wrong about what’s happening when undocumented people are arrested in courthouses. I’ll get to why. Ezra Klein took his falsehoods at face value, which may not surprise some but did surprise me. And neither of them understand U.S. immigration law.

Here’s what I learned from reading Harris Sockel: He thinks snark and unearned confidence are substitutes for actual knowledge and understanding. I’ll get to why.

In a media environment where people are throwing around phrases like “eviscerating due process,” I think it’s important to understand the law, and examine the facts.

As we’ll see, I used the phrase “eviscerating due process” because the Trump administration is in fact “eviscerating due process.”

This next passage is where Sockel gets into the meat of his criticism, and gives us a little peek at what he learned in his week of self-education:

As succinctly as I can manage, here’s what’s going on. Many of the undocumented immigrants arrested by surprise in courthouses — like Oliver Mata Velazquez, a 19-year-old arrested in Buffalo while showing up at his mandated hearing — are seeking asylum.¹ Anyone can present themselves at the border claiming asylum, essentially arguing their life or freedom is threatened in their home country. When they do, the U.S. government has the authority to do one of two things under the Immigration and Nationality Act:

— Detain them immediately and expedite their asylum hearing (Section 235) or

— Release them and require them to return to court periodically to prove their case (Section 240)

The “expedited” process is supposed to take a week, in most cases. The non-expedited process (Section 240) can take up to a decade, and this was the default under Biden. (Biden also gave asylum applicants five-year work permits.)

So, for the last four years, there’s been almost no downside to arriving at the border and claiming asylum, even if your life or freedom is not in danger wherever you’re coming from. In fact, there’s been an incentive: a free five-year work permit. You could simply claim asylum and stay here, roaming freely, toddling into court every few months (or years), while you weave through our byzantine immigration system until your case is finally heard (or not), and a judge determines whether you were actually fleeing for your life. Under Section 240, this led to de facto open borders.

Immigration law is incredibly complicated, and not really amenable into bite-sized summaries. But even taking that into consideration, this passage is misleading (and pretty demeaning).

Most migrants today come from South and Central America. Their journey tends to be harrowing and dangerous. Many literally risk their lives to come here for the privilege of doing backbreaking work for very little pay.

For a long time, the anti-immigrant trope on the right has been that low-skill workers come to the U.S. to leech off our social welfare system. This has never been true — they contribute far more to the public coffers than they get from them. When the economy slows down, undocumented immigration slows, too. Which is to say that they come here to work, not to coast.

But Sockel’s complaint isn’t about freeloading. It’s that the Biden administration let migrants work jobs and pay taxes instead of idling in a jail cell while our immigration system chugs along. (What a woke jerk, that Biden!)

Still, old habits die hard. So even as he criticizes Biden for letting immigrants work, Sockel’s language — “roaming freely,” “toddling into court” — evokes the same racist tropes about shifty, lazy immigrants.

What the law says

First, Sockel has mixed up his laws. The law creating expedited removal is not the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was enacted in 1952. It’s the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, or IIRIRA, which was enacted in 1997.

Second, under Sockel’s telling, until Joe Biden, U.S. policy under this “29-year-old law” was always to promptly adjudicate asylum claims and, in most cases, send asylum seekers back from where they came. The Biden administration then came along and started letting everyone in, gave them all work permits, and bought them all condoms and ice cream cones.

Here’s what actually happened:

Prior to passage of the IIRIRA, anyone accused of being in the U.S. illegally had the right to be heard by an immigration court. IIRIRA was a major overhaul of the immigration system, and one its key provisions was the creation of expedited removal. This policy gave the executive branch the power to quickly deport some noncitizens who either attempt to enter the country or are already here without giving them a hearing in front of an immigration judge.

The justification for the law at the time was that it would primarily be used on migrants who showed up at ports of entry, and because those people had yet to set foot on U.S. soil, the Constitution did not protect them. The text of the new law allowed the executive to go well beyond that — to detain people who had been here for up to two years, and who were apprehended anywhere in the country. But the understanding at the time was that these powers would be used only in limited situations.

If someone put into expedited removal had an asylum claim — if they were fleeing persecution, violence, natural disaster, or other humanitarian crises — IIRIRA designated that claim to be heard by an asylum officer in what’s called a credible fear interview. If the asylum officer did not find the immigrant’s claim persuasive, that person would remain in expedited removal and could be deported in a matter of days. An asylum seeker could appeal an adverse decision to an immigration judge, but they had no right to a government-funded attorney for that appeal. And as we’ll see, under the current administration they can be — and are — deported before that appeal is even heard.

IIRIRA gave the executive branch a lot of discretion. But given the general understanding of how it would be used when it was passed, the Clinton administration only used expedited removal on two groups of people: migrants who showed up at ports of entry seeking asylum, and people who had previously gained entrance through fraud. Both fit with the original justification for the law — people who had not yet entered the country did not yet have constitutional rights, and those who entered via fraud forfeited those rights the moment they lied about their circumstances.

In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration expanded expedited removal to include two new groups of immigrants: those who illegally cross the southwest border between ports of entry, and those who enter the country by sea. But in order to put these new people into expedited removal, the administration limited those eligible for quick removal to people apprehended within two weeks of their arrival, and within 100 miles of the border.

The Bush-era expansion stretched the original justification for expedited removal, but still remained at least somewhat attached to it. The government’s position was now that if you enter the country illegally by crossing the southern border or by coming ashore without permission — and if you’re apprehended within 100 miles from the border, and if you’ve been here for less than two weeks — you haven’t established enough of a meaningful presence in the country to be protected by the Constitution.

This more or less remained the policy for 15 years. Then, in March 2020, the Trump administration dramatically expanded it.

Trump claimed the power to put into expedited removal any noncitizen apprehended anywhere in the country who had not been “inspected and paroled.” He also expanded the time you’d need to be in the country to avoid expedited removal from two weeks to two years.

Sockel is correct about one thing — Trump’s expansion of expedited removal is not inconsistent with IIRIRA. But the sweeping powers he’s claiming also abandon the original justification for the law. A policy that began as a limited intervention giving the government the power to remove people who had yet to set foot in the country is now expanded to the point where government can remove people from anywhere within two years of arrival. If you’ve been here for 18 months and are apprehended in, say, Omaha, it seems like you ought to be protected by due process.

There was a lot of anger and public debate about Trump’s expansion of expedited removal in 2020. But it also came at the tail end of Trump’s term. And, in any case, Trump wasn’t even using it much at the time. His administration found it easier to use a different law to kick people out without due process (more on that in a minute).

When Biden took office in 2021, he returned the policy to what it had been for the 20 years prior to Trump.

This is an important point that Sockel gets wrong. Biden’s policy asylum was not uniquely forgiving. Trump’s was uniquely restrictive.

Every immigration expert I’ve spoken to says that while the Biden administration made a lot of mistakes, the idea that Biden’s immigration policy amounted to “open borders” is risible. It just isn’t true.

“What they tried to do was treat each case with the legal seriousness it deserved. They took seriously their responsibility to enforce the law,” one immigration advocate told me. “I think they were unprepared for the surge in migrants and they handled it poorly,” another told me. “But then they overcorrected, and in some ways had the most restrictive policies in decades.”

As I mentioned, Trump was making use of a different law in 2020, which allowed him to deport people at the border without any due process at all. That law, known as Title 42, gives the executive the power to deport people during a public health emergency. Trump invoked it during the Covid pandemic, and Biden continued to use it after taking office. It did a lot of damage.

The executive’s power to use Title 42 ended in May 2023 when the Covid emergency expired. At this point, the Biden administration started making more use of expedited removal. As you can see from the chart below, compiled by the American Immigration Council, the number of expedited removal cases dropped when Trump switched to Title 42 in 2020, shot up under Biden starting in 2021, and then exploded in 2023 and 2024. In 2024 Biden put more people in expedited removal than Trump did in any year of his first term.

So Sockel’s claim that Biden is some historical anomaly who refused to utilize expedited removal is provably, demonstrably false. In fact, the only president who sent more people into expedited removal in a single year than Biden did in 2024 was . . . Barack Obama in 2015.

Source: the American Immigration Council

When Trump resumed office in 2025, he changed the policy back, again claiming the most expansive powers for expedited removal allowed under the IIRIRA.

So when Sockel writes that Section 240 — the process by which people seeking asylum are paroled and allowed to work while their claims are adjudicated — was the “default” under Biden, he’s misleading his readers in a few different ways.

First, Section 240 has always been the default way we adjudicate immigration claims. Expedited removal has always been the exception. And the Trump administration has expanded its power to put people into expedited removal more than any other administration. Second, Biden deported more people under expedited removal in 2024 than any prior president aside from Obama — and more than Trump did in any year of his first term. Trump will likely exceed both this time around. But there’s no reality in which the Biden administration wasn’t using expedited removal.

Sockel goes back to this claim later in his screed:

. . . without enforcement, “asylum” means nothing (except a borderless nation).

As of last December, there were over three million pending asylum claims in the U.S. I think most reasonable people would agree those claims should be heard, and judged, as quickly as possible.

Again, we were not a “bordlerless nation” under Biden. We were a nation with an administration that, at least for the first couple years, was trying to ensure that each asylum claim was properly adjudicated under the law.

It’s true that there is currently a huge backlog of asylum claims. There are complicated reasons for that. The main one is the massive surge in migrants that started in 2018. (That would be Trump’s second year in office.) Many came from Venezuela, a country with a wrecked economy ruled by a corrupt, incompetent, and vindictive dictator. Other refugees fled gang violence in Central America. Some were LGTBQ people fleeing persecution.

There are also persuasive arguments that much of the surge was caused by disastrous U.S. foreign policy, drug policy, and deportation policy — which, if true, would confer some moral obligation on us to consider those claims carefully and generously.

Yes, a lot more people were paroled into the country under Biden than under Trump, Biden also deported a lot more people. See this New York Times graph — it’s striking visualization of just how many people Biden removed.

It’s also true that Obama and Biden had different immigration priorities than Trump. Both explicitly ordered federal immigration officials to prioritize deporting undocumented people with violent criminal records. In both his first and second terms, Trump quickly revoked that policy. Instead, his priorities have been removing asylum seekers and maximizing deportations, regardless of whether the deported pose a real threat.

Consequently, about 60 percent of the people detained under Trump have no criminal record at all. That’s up from 47 percent under Biden. And through the first of June, ICE under Trump has arrested about 800 percent more people with no criminal record than at the same point last year under Biden.

This is why they’re arresting people at courthouses. People who show up for their hearings are easier to find, detain, and deport than people with violent criminal histories, who tend to go into hiding. This is also why Stephen Miller demanded ICE start raiding Home Depots.

Sockel writes that the IIRIRA under Trump can’t possibly “eviscerate due process” because it’s the law. But eviscerating due process is what the law was written to do, particularly when used in its most expansive application. The entire point of the law was to deny immigrants the right to challenge their deportations in court. That the law was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court doesn’t change this.

The other laws Trump is ignoring

As it turns out, there are laws, policies, and court decisions governing deportation, asylum, and immigration other than the one Sockel took a week to partially educate himself about. And the Trump administration is violating those too.

The policy they’re most egregiously violating states that people who were paroled into the country for humanitarian reasons are not eligible for expedited removal. I’ll discuss this more in part two, but the Trump administration has all but ignored this policy, and under dubious legal reasoning.

Another law the Trump administration is violating has to do with his revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants. TPS was created under George H.W. Bush to assist people fleeing war, persecution, genocide, and natural disasters. These people were all explicitly told that they could come to the U.S. legally.

Of course, the “temporary” in TPS suggests that the protection may not last forever. But if you’re going to end it, the humane way to do so would be to do it gradually. Or better yet, give people who have spent years living productive lives here a pathway to citizenship. At the very least, give people time to adjust to the fact that they’ll need to uproot their lives.

Instead, since taking office, Trump has abruptly revoked TPS for immigrants from Afghanistan, Haiti, Nepal, Honduras, and other countries. Bhutanese people were granted TPS to escape a genocide. Trump is now deporting them back to the country that tried to exterminate them. There have been mixed reports about TPS status for Ukrainians who came here to flee the war. The administration has extended TPS for Ukrainians who already have TPS through October of next year. But most came here via other humanitarian programs, and their status is less clear.

Some of these people have lived in the U.S. for decades. They have children who are U.S. citizens. They have integrated themselves into their communities. TPS resettlement communities have revitalized depressed economies in the Rust Belt — including the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio that Trump and JD Vance viciously slandered in 2024.

Whether Trump can so abruptly revoke TPS is currently being litigated (thus far the Supreme Court has been predictably deferential). But under the law, people with revoked TPS cannot be put into expedited removal. Immigration attorneys I’ve spoken to said they’re doing it anyway, though not yet at the scale they’re doing it to people on humanitarian parole.

U.S. law also prohibits putting unaccompanied children into expedited removal. The administration has been caught violating that policy too, most recently when they tried to deport dozens of Guatemalan children over a holiday weekend after falsely telling a federal judge that the children’s parents had given their approval. Another federal judge, appointed by Trump himself, has since reprimanded the administration.

Moreover, Congress has appropriated funding to provide attorneys for unaccompanied minors in these cases, to ensure that their rights are defended. The Trump administration has been repeatedly rebuked by federal courts for cutting off that funding.

Finally, there’s at least one other law this administration is violating. David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, tells me that federal law prohibits the executive branch from putting people in expedited removal if they’ve come from countries in the western hemisphere with which the United States doesn’t have full diplomatic relations.

There are a couple intuitive reasons for this. The practical reason is that these countries aren’t likely to accept deportations. But also, the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have diplomatic relations with a country suggests the government thinks that people fleeing that country are likely doing so for legitimate reasons.

While Bier says this law has yet to be litigated in court, it is still the law. And by putting Venezuelan and Cuban refugees into expedited removal, the administration is — once again — violating the law.

Next, in part two, we’ll look at the bigger problem, and one Sockel ignores completely — the alarming, unlawful ways this administration is enforcing these policies on the ground.

(Thanks to David Bier, Javad Khazaeli, and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick — along with one other immigration advocate and two other immigration attorneys who asked not to be named — for their help with this post.)

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