The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] 2-1 Tuesday that immigrants who are caught entering the US illegally have no right to legal representation in an expedited hearing.

A law passed in 1996 allows Customs and Border Protection officers to use a process of “expedited removal” to remove immigrants who are caught within 100 miles of the border without valid documentation. Immigrants who are subject to expedited removal are not given a lawyer, nor do they receive a trial. The appeals court upheld the deportation of a Mexican immigrant who was returned to his country the day after being arrested while crossing the US border in 2012, finding that his “expedited removal was not fundamentally unfair.” One judge dissented, stating he “would hold that there is a due process right to counsel during expedited removal proceedings.”

Right to counsel in immigration proceedings remains a controversial topic. In September the Ninth Circuit ruled that children facing deportation proceedings may not file a class action suit [JURIST report] to determine whether they are entitled to an attorney as a due process right. The opinion reversed in part a ruling that determined the federal courts had jurisdiction to hear the class action lawsuit on constitutional grounds. The three-judge panel ruled instead that the Immigration and Nationality Act [text] exclusive review process applied, necessitating that each individual plaintiff file an appeal in the federal court after all deportation proceedings were exhausted. In 2014 then-US Attorney General Eric Holder argued in a speech at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Convention of the Hispanic National Bar Association hat migrant children who come across the border unaccompanied should have legal representation [JURIST report].