WASHINGTON — President Trump may seek to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants who recently entered the United States under a two-year grant of parole, the Supreme Court decided Friday.
Over two dissents, the justices granted an emergency appeal and set aside rulings by judges in Boston who blocked Trump’s repeal of the parole policy adopted by the Biden administration.
That 2023 policy opened the door for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to apply for entry and a work authorization if they had a financial sponsor and could pass background checks. By the time Biden left office, 530,000 people from those countries had entered the U.S. under the program.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
“The court plainly botched this,” Jackson said, adding that it should have kept the case on hold during the appeals.
It was the second time in two weeks that the justices upheld Trump’s authority to revoke a large-scale Biden administration policy that gave temporary legal status to some migrants.
The first revoked program gave temporary protected status to around 350,000 Venezuelans who were in this country and feared they could be sent home.
The parole policy allowed up to 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries to enter the country with temporary legal protection. Biden’s officials saw it as a way to reduce illegal border crossings and to provide a safe and legal pathway for carefully screened migrants.
The far-reaching policy was based on a modest-sounding provision of the immigration laws. It says the secretary of Homeland Security may “parole into United States temporarily … on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons any alien” who is seeking admission.
Upon taking office, Trump ordered an end to “all categorical parole programs.” In late March, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the parole protection would end in 30 days.
But last month, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked DHS’s “categorical” termination of the parole authority. The law said the government may grant parole on a “case-by-case basis,” she said, and that suggests it must be revoked on a case-by-case basis as well.
On May 5, the 1st Circuit Court in a 3-0 decision agreed that a “categorical termination” of parole appeared to be illegal.
Three days later, Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed another emergency appeal at the Supreme Court arguing that a judge had overstepped her authority.
The parole authority is “purely discretionary” in the hands of the DHS secretary, he wrote, and the law bars judges from reviewing those decisions.
While the Biden administration “granted parole categorically to aliens” from four counties, he said the Boston-based judges blocked the new policy because it is “categorical.”
He accused the judges of “needlessly upending critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core Executive Branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”
Immigrants rights advocates had urged the court to stand aside for now.
Granting the administration’s appeal “would cause an immense amount of needless human suffering,” they told the court.
They said the migrants “all came to the United States with the permission of the federal government after each individually applied through a U.S. financial sponsor, passed security and other checks while still abroad, and received permission to fly to an airport here at no expense to the government to request parole.”
“Some class members have been here for nearly two years; others just arrived in January,” they added.
In response, Sauer asserted the migrants had no grounds to complain. They “accepted parole with full awareness that the benefit was temporary, discretionary, and revocable at any time,” he said.
The Biden administration began offering temporary entry to Venezuelans in late 2022, then expanded the program a few months later to people from the other three countries.
In October of last year, the Biden administration announced that it would not offer renewals of parole and directed those immigrants to apply to other forms of relief, such as asylum or temporary protected status.
It’s unclear exactly how many people remained protected solely through the parole status and could now be targeted for deportation. It’s also not clear whether the administration will seek to deport many or most of these immigrants.
But parolees who recently tried to adjust their legal status have hit a roadblock.
In a Feb. 14 memo, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it was placing an administrative hold on all pending benefit requests filed by those under the parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, as well as a program for Ukrainians and another for family reunification.
The memo said USCIS needed to implement “additional vetting flags” to identify fraud, public safety or national security concerns.
“It’s going to force people into an impossible choice,” said Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. Those who stay face potential detention and deportation, she said, while those who willingly leave the U.S. would be giving up on their applications.
The DHS memo said the government could extend the parole for some of them on a case-by-case basis. But Trump’s lawyers said migrants who were here less than two years could be deported without a hearing under the “expedited removal” provisions of the immigration laws.
Inlender said the government should not be allowed to strip people of lawfully granted legal status without sufficient reason or notice. Inlender, who defended the program against a challenge from Texas in 2023, said she expects swift individual legal challenges to the Trump administration’s use of expedited removal.
“So many people’s lives are on the line,” Inlender said. “These people did everything right — they applied through a lawful program, they were vetted. And to pull the rug out from under them in this way should be, I think, offensive to our own idea of what justice is in this country.”
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