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A group backed by George Soros has brought a class-action lawsuit to prevent the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from fining illegal immigrants who refuse to self-deport.
The lawsuit was filed on Thursday by two immigrant woman and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
The Center receives millions of dollars in annual funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations. In 2022, for example, the Center received a $3.9 million grant.
Both of the women who have filed the suit have been ordered to leave the US by a federal immigration judge.
They claim the fines imposed by the DHS are illegal.
Since Trump returned to the White House, the DHS has issued close to 32,000 fine notices to illegal immigrants, with a total value of $9.6 billion.
“Our message is clear: If you’re in the country illegally, leave now or face the consequences,” DHS’s Tricia McLaughlin said of the fines.
In related immigration news, on Saturday a federal appeals court refused to allow the Trump administration to expand its expedited deportation process.
A three-person panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled not to place a hold a ruling by a lower-court judge that the expedited process violates the due process of immigrants apprehended anywhere within the US.
District Judge Jia Cobb had sided with an immigrant-rights group and blocked the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing policies that allowed immigrants to be deported quickly if they had been in the country for less than two years.
The Court of Appeals said the policy poses “serious risks of erroneous summary removal” when it is applied beyond the borders of the US.
US circuit judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dissented and called Cobb’s ruling “impermissible judicial interference.”
The expedited process for removal has been in force at the US border for almost 30 years.
In January, the Trump administration expanded its coverage to non-citizens apprehended anywhere within the US who could not demonstrate they had been in the US for two years.
