The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to remove the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, supporting the Republican president’s push to increase deportations.
The court stayed Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s order halting the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 of these migrants by former President Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to immediate removal, while the case is heard in lower courts.
The ruling was unsigned and did not justify, as is common with emergency court orders. Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, officially dissented, CNN noted.
Immigration parole is a type of temporary authorization granted by American law to enter the nation for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” which allows grantees to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s strategy for deterring illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20, his first day back in office, calling for the elimination of humanitarian parole programs. The Department of Homeland Security then attempted to terminate them in March, shortening the two-year parole awards. The government said that revoking parole would make it simpler to place migrants in an “expedited removal” procedure.
The lawsuit is one of many that the Trump administration has filed urgently with the nation’s highest court, seeking to overturn judgments by lower courts that hinder his sweeping plans, including those targeting immigration.
On May 19, the Supreme Court also allowed Trump to withdraw a deportation protection known as temporary protected status, which Biden had granted to some 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States while the legal battle was being resolved.
To minimize illegal border crossings, Biden announced in 2022 that Venezuelans who entered the United States by air might receive a two-year parole provided they passed security screenings and had a U.S. financial sponsor.
Biden expanded the procedure to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans in 2023, as his government dealt with large numbers of illegal immigration from those countries.
The plaintiffs, a group of paroled migrants and Americans who serve as their sponsors, sued administration officials, alleging that they violated federal law controlling government agency acts.
In April, Talwani determined that the statute regulating such parole did not allow for the program’s blanket termination but rather required a case-by-case examination.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay the judge’s judgment.
In its filing, the Justice Department informed the Supreme Court that Talwani’s order had overturned “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry,” effectively “undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election” that returned Trump to the presidency.
In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court made headlines on Thursday with another key ruling.
The nation’s highest court on Thursday reduced the scope of environmental studies for key infrastructure projects, potentially speeding up permits for highways, airports, and pipelines.
The judgment is the latest loss for environmentalists at the conservative Supreme Court, which has recently thrown down measures aimed at protecting wetlands and preventing cross-state air pollution. President Donald Trump has often criticized the government’s environmental assessment process as overly onerous.
The National Environmental Policy Act, signed by President Richard Nixon, is regarded as one of the fundamental environmental legislation enacted at the start of the modern environmental movement.
The Supreme Court is releasing many key decisions, as it will finish its term at the end of June. The Trump administration is awaiting many key decisions.
