By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Sept 18 (Reuters) – A US federal appeals court rejected on Friday a Trump administration policy that allows authorities to rapidly deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to raise safety concerns.
Ruling in a case that is likely headed to the US Supreme Court, a three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld a February decision by a lower-court judge that declared the US Department of Homeland Security’s policy was unlawful.
The case is a key test of what due process protections the government must provide migrants before removing them to countries they have no connection to.
Under Trump, the administration has entered into a series of agreements that have allowed it to send more than 25,000 migrants to at least 29 third countries, in many cases Mexico, according to Third Country Deportation Watch, a project run by Refugees International and Human Rights First.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday’s court decision.
US District Judge Brian Murphy had concluded that the policy, adopted in March 2025 as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, failed to protect migrants’ due process rights and could lead to their swift deportation without notice to unfamiliar and potentially dangerous countries.
The Trump administration had twice before in the same case convinced the Supreme Court to intervene after Murphy had ruled against it in earlier phases of the litigation over the third-country policy, and it had indicated a willingness to go back to the high court again if the 1st Circuit upheld Murphy’s latest ruling.
That ruling came in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of migrants facing deportation to countries not previously named in their removal orders or identified in their immigration court proceedings.
Under the policy, migrants can be deported to such countries if immigration authorities have credible diplomatic assurances they will not be persecuted or tortured there. Alternatively, authorities can proceed if they have given migrants as little as six hours of notice that they are being sent to such a country.
Murphy, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, set aside the policy and declared that migrants who had been subject to it had a right to meaningful notice and a chance to raise objections to being deported to third countries.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
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