Washington DC - A federal appeals court has barred President Donald Trump's administration from ramping up its fast-track deportation plan, putting on hold a policy which risked undermining immigrants' due process rights.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia voted 2-1 against putting on hold a previous lower-court ruling which claimed that the Trump administration's fast-track deportation program violated due process rights.

District Judge Jia Cobb had on August 29 blocked the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing new rapid expulsion rules. The DHS then appealed for a stay of the order.

Appeals Court Judges Patricia Millett and J. Michelle Chiles did not believe that the administration had sufficiently proved that its policy would adequately protect migrants' due process rights under the Fifth Amendment in cases where they had been present in the US for less than two years.

"Federal law affords individuals present in the United States whom the government charges as being removable the right to a hearing before an immigration judge," Millett and Chiles wrote in the ruling.

The judges expressed concern that the Trump administration's fast-track program seriously increases the risk of "erroneous summary removal," especially as it expands away from the borders to cover all US territory.

An expedited removal process already exists to fast-track the return of migrants who are apprehended within 100 miles of the border. The Trump administration's expansion of this program, however, would see migrants rounded up all over the country.

Cobb's order was largely left in place, but Millett and Chiles stayed proposed changes to the way that immigration officers "evaluate detained individuals' claims of credible fear" on the basis that the proposed systems and procedures are "constitutionally sufficient."