Updated June 12, 2025 at 1:33 PM EDT
Vadzim Bulaty, a political asylee from Belarus who opposed the country's seven-term president Alexander Lukashenko, was sitting in a Minnesota immigration courtroom last month.
It was the first immigration court hearing for his eldest son, Aliaksandr Bulaty. Aliaksandr had come to the U.S. to join his father around May 2024 by seeking asylum through the app formerly known as CBP One, which allowed migrants to schedule appointments at legal ports of entry.
The goal of the first court hearing was to ask for more time for a lawyer to help get Aliaksandr's asylum application connected to his father's. But they never got a chance to tell the judge.
During the hearing in May, the attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) requested that the case be dismissed, his father recalled in an interview to NPR.
"I understood the prosecutor's words as the case was being dismissed, and you can be free," Vadzim Bulaty said. "I didn't expect it to be a legal trap, a verbal trap."
Father and son went to leave the building, believing their cases were now going to continue as one. Instead, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement met them just a few steps from the exit with handcuffs and told Aliaksandr he was subject to expedited removal within three days.
Aliaksandr has spent weeks at the Freeborn Adult Detention Center, with his lawyer fighting his deportation to a country where his father says he's likely to get immediately imprisoned.
He is one of over 100 people who have been arrested at immigration courts across the country as a part of ICE's latest strategy to meet its steep new 3,000-person daily arrest quota.
The strategy of DHS dismissing cases and then arresting migrants at court at first caught judges and lawyers off guard.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees immigration courts and is part of the Department of Justice, detailed the approach for judges in a May 30 email obtained by NPR. NBC was first to report that email.
It's one of several tactics the Trump administration has used in order to streamline cases and more quickly deport people without legal status from the U.S.
The tactics seem to be paying off: Last week, the administration touted two days of national arrest numbers topping 2,000, their highest since President Trump took office, according to DHS.
"This is all part of a strategy by the current administration to essentially bypass the legal system, to bypass courts, deny people the opportunity of getting a fair day in court in order to rapidly deport as many people as possible without respect for the rule of law," said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
In response to questions about the new strategy in immigration courts, ICE said most people who entered the U.S. illegally within the past two years can be quickly deported.
"ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been," a spokesperson for the agency said in an email to NPR.
Not everyone caught up in this tactic entered the country illegally; those who entered using the CBP One app during the Biden administration were granted temporary permissions to reside in the U.S., which Trump has since revoked.
Change from past practice
The May 30 email from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, addressed to court supervisors, mentioned that the courts' "caseload has greatly increased in the past few months."
In order to reduce the backlog, judges are encouraged to immediately make a decision on whether to dismiss a case from the bench, and without giving migrants the typical 10 days to dispute it.
Veronica Cardenas, former assistant chief counsel at DHS under three prior presidents, including during Trump's first term, said that a motion to "dismiss" a case in immigration courts used to be a good thing.
In the past, she said, that motion would remove the case from the court calendar and the migrant could seek relief from deportation through other ways such as by applying for asylum.
"But now we're seeing that that dismissal actually means something worse for noncitizens, where ICE officers are waiting outside to handcuff them," said Cardenas, now an immigration lawyer in New Jersey.
Under the new approach, after their case is dismissed, immigrants are arrested again, at times before even leaving the building — as happened with Aliaksandr Bulaty. Then they're put in a process called expedited removal: a fast-track for deportation that does not guarantee the right to a day in court and comes with a five-year restriction on attempting to return to the U.S.
ICE arrested hundreds of people within the first few days of deploying this strategy in late May in immigration courts, according to a count from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Immigration attorneys first noticed the new strategy in about 14 cities, and over the past few weeks has seen it expanded to other states and courts, including Boston, New York City and Northern Virginia.
Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, said the new policy aligns with Trump's mass deportation effort by helping courts reduce their case backlog — which currently sits at about 4 million cases.
She also said part of the strategy could also be encouraging people in detention to leave rather than fighting their claims.
"The alien uses that factor [detention] to weigh what they're going to do as well," Ries said. "We can't overlook self-deportation."
But immigration lawyers argue that this tactic of pulling people out of the court process sidesteps their due process.
The situation puts immigrants in a situation where they may face arrest or an order of removal even if they're following the steps to try to stay in the U.S., Cardenas said.
And if immigrants fail to show up for their scheduled court dates, that results in a final order of removal, too. Cardenas said the policy penalizes those who thought they were doing things "the right way."
"What this administration is doing is instilling that fear, because the rules are changing every day and there's no stability," she said.
Fears of returning to dictatorship
Aliaksandr Bulaty is still fighting his removal. It helps that, unlike many other migrants, he has a lawyer: Malinda Schmiechen, who also represented his father's case.
"My client is someone who has no criminal background. He had filed an asylum application," Schmiechen said. "He is now detained in a county jail and he's going to be there for a while."
This week, Schmiechen was able to successfully argue before an immigration judge to reopen Aliaksandr's immigration case. This means that for now he won't be imminently deported, though he will stay in detention. His case now returns to the removal proceedings it was in before he was detained.
Vadzim Bulaty said he is able to regularly talk to his son — and hears about his overcrowded detention room shared with 30 others; the lights don't turn off and they're not allowed to go outside for fresh air.
Since immigrating to the U.S. in 2022, Vadzim Bulaty said he has generally felt welcome. The family has adjusted well, learned to smile and greet strangers in their small suburb of Otsego, Minn.
"We are very glad that we ended up in America, because America is an amazing country in relation to immigrants," he said. "In no other country in the world would we be so at home."
However, even with his own legal status, he is now worried for himself, his wife and his other sons. And he fears what could happen to his eldest.
"I ran away from one dictatorship," he said. "And I would not want another dictatorship in America."
NPR's Anna Yukhananov contributed to this report.
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