SAN DIEGO — A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s move to vastly extend authority of immigration officers to deport people without allowing them to appear before judges.

The policy, announced in July but not yet enforced, would allow fast-track deportations for anyone in the country illegally for less than two years. Now, the fast deportations are largely limited to people arrested almost immediately after crossing the Mexican border.

U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, ruling late Friday in Washington, said the expansion of “expedited removal” authority violated procedural requirements to first seek public comment and ignored flaws in how it has been used on a smaller scale at the border.

The shortcomings, which government lawyers did not challenge, include allegations that some people entitled to be in the country were targeted for deportation, translators weren’t provided, and authorities made “egregious errors” recording statements of migrants who said they feared persecution or torture back in their homelands.

“With respect to the policy at issue here, the potential devastation is so obvious that [the Homeland Security Department] can be fairly faulted for its unexplained failure to predict, and attempt to mitigate, the fully foreseeable future floods,” Jackson wrote.

Jackson hasn’t ruled on merits of the case, but her decision bars expansion of fast-track authority nationwide while a lawsuit proceeds.

The fast-track deportation powers were created under a 1996 law but didn’t become a major piece of border enforcement until 2004, when Homeland Security said it would be enforced for people arrested within two weeks of entering the U.S. by land and caught within 100 miles of the border.

Defenders say it relieves burdens on immigration judges — their case backlog topped 1 million. Critics say it grants too much power to Border Patrol agents and other immigration enforcement officials and jeopardizes rights to fair treatment.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Keven McAleenan said in July that U.S. authorities didn’t have space to detain “the vast majority” of people arrested on the border, leading to the release of hundreds of thousands with notices to appear in court. He said expanded authority would probably cause illegal entries to decline and result in people getting more quickly removed from the country than in immigration courts, where cases can take years to resolve.

The Justice Department said Saturday that the judge had overstepped her authority and undermined laws enacted by Congress, with careful consideration by the administration on how to enforce them. The White House echoed that view and added that “misguided lower court decisions have been preventing [immigration] laws from ever being enforced — at immense cost to the whole country.”