A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday sided with a Biden-appointed district judge and struck down a key Trump administration policy that let Homeland Security rapidly remove illegal aliens to third countries when their home nations refuse to take them back.
The ruling, written by Biden appointee Judge Seth Aframe, largely upheld U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s February decision declaring the Department of Homeland Security’s 2025 guidance unlawful.
The panel said aliens must be given “meaningful” notice and a chance to claim they fear persecution or torture in the destination country before they can be put on a plane.
That’s the same Judge Murphy The Gateway Pundit previously reported on when the Supreme Court smacked down his earlier nationwide injunction and allowed the Trump administration to resume third-country removals, including flights to places like South Sudan.
The First Circuit did throw out one piece of Murphy’s order on standing grounds: the demand that DHS first try to send people to countries they have ties to before using a third country. But the core of the policy, the ability to move quickly with diplomatic assurances and short notice, is now blocked unless the government provides more process.
President Trump’s team has used third-country agreements to deport more than 25,000 illegal aliens to at least 29 countries, including Mexico, Rwanda, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, and others that agreed to take people their own governments would not accept.
Many of these aliens already had final removal orders. Their home countries simply stonewalled. The third-country option was the workaround.
Open-borders lawyers and NGOs immediately celebrated. Trina Realmuto of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance called it a “major victory.” Of course they did. Slowing deportations is the whole point.
The administration can still appeal to the full First Circuit or go straight to the Supreme Court. Given that the high court has already twice intervened in this same case to let third-country removals proceed, that is the obvious next stop.
The panel that issued Friday’s opinion included two Biden appointees (Aframe and Lara Montecalvo) and one George W. Bush appointee, Judge Jeffrey Howard.
Aframe, a former federal prosecutor confirmed in 2024 on a party-line vote, wrote that DHS’s reading of the law would “deny access to that protection to a substantial swath of noncitizens.”
In other words, the court decided the statute requires extra process even when the destination country has given diplomatic assurances and the alien already lost his case.
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