Supreme Court allows Trump to revoke legal status for 500K migrants for now
A divided Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way, for now, for the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who have been allowed to live and work in the United States while their immigration cases play out.
The ruling is the second time in recent weeks the high court has given Trump officials permission to terminate programs that protect immigrants fleeing countries racked by war or economic turmoil. Earlier this month, the justices allowed the administration to revoke temporary protections that allowed a different group of nearly 350,000 Venezuelans to live and work in the United States.
As is common with decisions on the court’s emergency docket, the majority did not explain on Friday why it was lifting a lower-court block on revoking the Biden-era parole program. The majority’s action came over a fiery dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was joined by fellow liberal Sonia Sotomayor.
“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson wrote. “It undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
Jackson warned that “social and economic chaos will ensue if that many noncitizen parolees are suddenly and summarily remanded” to their home countries, noting that many were invited by the U.S. government to come here because of unsafe conditions abroad. The migrants granted parole to enter the country have sponsors, Jackson wrote, and in many cases “have integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hopes of eventually securing long term legal status.”
Legal challenges to the Trump administration’s revocations of legal status will continue in lower courts, and could eventually reach the Supreme Court for full hearings on the merits. For now, the justices are allowing two of President Donald Trump’s most aggressive moves to deport large numbers of migrants who during the Biden administration were given permission to live and work in the U.S.
Immigrant advocates said the revocation of status and work permits for roughly 900,000 migrants is largely unprecedented and will have devastating effects on migrant communities across the country.
Trump officials say the migrants are a public safety threat and a drain on the nation’s resources.
The parole policy involved in Friday’s decision allowed migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to get preapproval to travel to the U.S. and stay up to two years.
A federal court in Massachusetts had ruled that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem could not issue a blanket ban on “humanitarian parole” and had to review each migrant’s case individually. That ruling was upheld by an appeals court in New England in April before the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court.
“The district court has nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in his filing with the Supreme Court.
President Joe Biden started the program in 2022 as a way to ease the crush of illegal crossings at the southern border, allow migrants to go through security screens and reduce the strain on Homeland Security resources. Each migrant in the program has to have a financial sponsor in the United States.
Trump officials have sharply criticized the program. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order canceling the parole, and Noem moved to revoke it. Generally, without a parole program or other protections in place, a migrant who does not have permission to enter the United States can be deported or detained pending removal proceedings.
“Reviewing the results of those mass-parole programs, the new Administration concluded that they ‘at best traded an unmanageable population of unlawful migration along the southwest border for the additional complication of a substantial population of aliens in the interior of the United States without a clear path to a durable status,’” Sauer wrote in his filing to the Supreme Court.
A nonprofit organization and nearly two dozen migrants sued to block the ban on parole, saying that Noem had exceeded her authority and that the cancellation would cause “an immense amount of needless human suffering” if not for the district court’s stay.
“The Plaintiff class of approximately half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans lawfully in this country would have become undocumented, legally unemployable, and subject to mass expulsion on an expedited basis,” they wrote in their filing.
The case is one of a number of battles that have played out over Trump’s immigration policies on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. In mid-May, the justices extended a block on Trump using a wartime authority to deport migrants who are alleged gang members from Northern Texas and heard arguments related to the president’s attempts to ban birthright citizenship.
The high court also ruled the Trump administration must facilitate the return of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Kilmar Abrego García is still being held in a megaprison there.
Ann Marimow contributed to this report.
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