5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable
Empower the Secretary to halt and expel aliens during a mass migration event
Printed page 152 5. Department of Homeland Security
“Provide that whenever the Secretary of Homeland Security determines that an actual or anticipated mass migration of aliens en route to or arriving off the coast of the U.S. presents urgent circumstances requiring an immediate federal response, the Secretary may make, subject to the approval of the President, rules and regulations prohibiting in whole or in part the introduction of persons from such countries or places as he or she shall designate … including through the expulsion of such aliens. Such rule and regulation making shall not be subject to the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act.”
What has happened
- Blocked
The D.C. Circuit affirmed: the power to suspend entry by proclamation does not carry the power to remove people already present without the INA's removal procedures and protections. The class certification and the vacatur stand. The Quote's premise - that this authority can simply be provided by executive fiat - is now the subject of a holding to the contrary; providing it would take legislation.
- Blocked
In RAICES v. Noem the District Court for the District of Columbia certified a class of everyone subject to the Proclamation, declared the implementing guidance unlawful and vacated it, and enjoined summary removals carried out under the Proclamation without the INA's procedures. The asserted authority to expel on the Secretary's say-so was the specific thing the court held did not exist.
- Attempted
No instrument gives the Secretary the standing authority the Quote describes. What exists is the President exercising an analogous power himself: Proclamation 10888 found an "invasion" for want of operational control of the border, invoked INA sections 212(f) and 215(a) and Article II to suspend entry, barred those crossing from invoking the asylum statute and directed DHS to "repel, repatriate, or remove" them - without notice-and-comment. That is the mass-migration expulsion power the Quote wants vested in the Secretary, asserted by the President instead.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
The Quote is drafted as statutory text (“Provide that whenever the Secretary … determines …”) but the extraction records it as executive, because the Mandate places it among the actions DHS should take. Read either way, the answer is the same instrument.
Overlap: #346 (p. 147) is the major-tier ask for a Title 42-style expulsion authority inside Title 8 and carries the full four-step court sequence, including the D.C. Circuit’s partial stay of 2025-08-01 and the certiorari petition of 2026-08-24 (Supreme Court docket 26-239). This item takes the same Evidence with its own reading: the ask here is the Secretary’s rulemaking-and-expulsion power specifically, and the appellate holding goes directly to it. The 2025-08-01 partial stay left the removal-procedure injunction in force and so does not change this Status; it is recorded here rather than as a fourth event.
Sibling ask: #379, the Title 8 waiver authority, is not started on the same reading.
- Action
- create
- Object
- Secretary's mass migration emergency authority
- ID
- 378