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President Donald Trump’s administration has found a new way to gut due process and fast-track deportation for asylum applicants. U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, or USCIS, the agency that manages visas, green cards, naturalizations, and other aspects of the legal immigration process, published a new regulation Monday allowing officers to refer hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly to deportation proceedings without interviewing them.The rule would scrap USCIS’s long-standing practice of offering interviews to asylum applicants already in the United States. The agency claimed that it had previously offered interviews despite there being “no statutory right to an interview or requirement to conduct one.” The rule would also remove references in Department of Homeland Security materials to a “right” to an interview and language asserting that asylum officers would review cases “in an interview.” “This means many people will never get a chance to argue their case,” Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X Monday. In order to receive asylum, applicants must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country.The filing states that the new rule will “more quickly place certain aliens into removal proceedings” with immigration judges at the Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR. Once asylum applicants are passed to the EOIR, the cases that are deemed “legally deficient” may be pretermitted, meaning those applicants can be deported without a hearing. No interview and no hearing? That sounds like a clear violation of due process—which the Trump administration has been angling to obliterate for more than a year.In addition, the new rule would allow asylum officers to “determine that the alien does not merit a grant [of asylum] as a matter of discretion without first making an eligibility determination,” and would also stop requiring a letter communicating that the basis for referral of asylum should include an assessment of the applicant’s credibility. The rule was published Monday, to be implemented Tuesday without prior warning or public comment period—and will likely invite a slew of legal challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act.

In January, President Trump told the media that his deadly extrajudicial strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean had maritime drug flow “down 97 percent.” New reporting from The Washington Post shows that was a lie. After over 60 strikes, more than 200 people are dead with no trial, and the Drug Enforcement Administration has confirmed that the flow of cocaine into the U.S. has not been impeded at all.Instead of stopping shipments, traffickers have just changed their strategies, taking larger vessels or even planes to circumvent international waters, the DEA found.“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” one naval intelligence official from Ecuador said. “They know that while the United States may destroy one speedboat, they will successfully get 10 semisubmersibles—or other speedboats that evade detection—through.”“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” an anonymous DEA official told the Post. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” While DEA officials noted that prices rose after the first two months of strikes, smugglers “adapted to the intensified pressure,” and neither supply nor price had “been noticeably affected.”In April, just over seven months into the strikes, Trump wrote that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” It’s unclear where he got that number from.Perhaps most troubling of all is the 221 people killed by the U.S. government without any kind of trial or legal process. There’s no way we even know for sure that they were “narcoterrorists”—these could have very well been innocent people, their deaths simply serving as fodder for Trump to drum up fear and resentment toward Latin America.

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The 1,400-bed facility comes as the Trump administration ramps up immigrant detention nationwide.