The Daily Fuckup

A federal appeals court on April 24, 2026, ruled that the Trump administration exceeded the authority Congress gave it when it used a presidential proclamation and later agency guidance to push certain migrants into a faster removal track that cut off statutory protections. In Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, et al. v. Markwayne Mullin, et al., the D.C. Circuit held that the proclamation and guidance were unlawful to the extent they bypassed the Immigration and Nationality Act’s removal procedures and denied people a chance to pursue asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture.

The panel did not strike down the proclamation power itself. Instead, it said the executive branch could not use that authority to build a separate removal system that overrides the statute Congress already wrote. The court said the INA supplies the relevant removal framework, and that framework includes the procedures and protections at issue here. The challenged guidance, the court concluded, tried to move people into summary removal without those safeguards.

The opinion also makes a narrower procedural point clear: the court affirmed summary judgment for the plaintiffs and affirmed class certification, while modifying the class definition as the opinion explains. That means the ruling not only resolved the merits against the government’s scheme, but also left class-wide relief in place in the form the panel approved.

The practical effect is to block the specific mechanism the administration used to accelerate removals at the border. The court did not create a new immigration rule; it enforced the one Congress already put in the statute. For the plaintiffs, that preserves relief for the class. For the government, it means any attempt to revive the same approach will have to fit inside the INA, not around it.