As Vadzim Baluty watched his son Aliaksandr Baluty get arrested by six plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers directly after an immigration court hearing, he had the sinking feeling he’d made a costly mistake.

Vadzim Baluty, accompanying his son for his first court appearance in his asylum bid, agreed last month when an ICE prosecutor offered to drop the case against the recent Belarusian migrant, not realizing his son would be swiftly detained as soon as the pair exited the courtroom.

“I felt like we had fallen into a judicial trap,” he said in Russian through an interpreter in an interview with The Hill.

“We left the courtroom and an ICE officer told us our son was going to be deported in three days. Nobody told us the decision that we made — what it was going to cause.”

ICE prosecutors across the country are increasingly moving to dismiss cases against migrants in a bid to fast track their deportations.

While a dismissal might seem like the end of a battle to remain in the county, some leaving courthouses have instead been met by ICE agents who are then free to arrest them and place them in expedited removal proceedings, speeding their deportation without a court hearing.

Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an immigration lawyer and board member with the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) called it a “bait and switch.”

“The troubling thing here is that people are doing the right thing and going to court. They hear what they think is great news, that their case is dismissed. But instead, they are subject to a bait and switch and a plainclothes ICE agent will then arrest them. They are detained and then they are pressured to sign documents that basically sign away all of their rights, and they are subject to expedited removal and don’t have a chance for a full and fair hearing,” she said in a call with reporters.

Vadzim Baluty, a 47-year-old Belarusian political activist who was granted asylum in 2022 after fleeing the Lukashenko dictatorship, thought ICE was aware of his petition to bring his children to the country.

He also didn’t think Aliaksandr Baluty, now 21, would be deported after entering........

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