Expedited removal

Expedited removal is the term for a process related to immigration enforcement in the United States where a non-citizen is denied entry to and/or physically removed from the United States, without going through removal proceedings (which involve a hearing before an immigration judge). Whereas the legal authority for expedited removal (in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996) allows for its use against most unauthorized entrants who have been in the United States for less than two years, its rollout so far has been restricted to people seeking admission and those who have been in the United States for 14 days or less, and excludes first-time violators from Mexico and Canada.

Expedited removal was first introduced in United States immigration law as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (also known as IIRIRA), passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by then United States President Bill Clinton.

The IIRIRA gave the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the name for the umbrella organization responsible for immigration enforcement in the United States at the time) the authority to remove from the United States, without the need for a hearing before an immigration judge, people who:

Starting April 1997, when the Act came into force, the INS implemented expedited removal only against noncitizens seeking admission at designated ports of entry (such as airports and sea ports). This fell well short of the mandate given to the agency by the law.

In November 2002, the INS expanded the application of expedited removal to people satisfying these three conditions:

Given that expedited removal now included people who were already present in the United States, and therefore might affect people eligible for asylum, the INS also introduced a credible fear screening process for those who indicated that they might be eligible for asylum.

In 2004, the United States Department of Homeland Security published an immediately effective notice in the Federal Register expanding the application of expedited removal to noncitizens who are encountered within 100 miles of any land or sea border and who entered the U.S. without inspection less than 14 days before the time they are encountered.U.S. Customs and Border Protection could therefore identify possible immigration violators anywhere in this 100-mile border zone and process them for expedited removal if they had been in the country for less than 14 days.

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