The US Supreme Court ruled on Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration can temporarily remove the legal status of more than 500,000 migrants living in the United States.
The verdict stayed an earlier federal judge’s injunction prohibiting the administration from eliminating the “parole” immigration programme established by former President Joe Biden.
The policy shielded people fleeing economic and political upheaval in their home nations.
The latest order puts approximately 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in danger of deportation.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, two of the court’s three liberal justices, disagreed.
According to the US government, the parole program provides immigrants with temporary status to work and live in the US for two years for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”.
The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court after a federal court in Massachusetts blocked the termination of the programme, also known as CHNV humanitarian parole.
According to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the White House “celebrated” the possibility of deporting 500,000 “invaders”. “The Supreme Court justly stepped in.”
In her dissent, Justice Jackson said that the court’s judgement would “have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims”.
On the day he took office, Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to eliminate parole programmes. Then, in March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the discontinuation of CHNV humanitarian parole.
Several immigrants’ rights organisations and program participants sued the Trump administration over the decision, claiming they would “face serious risks of danger, persecution, and even death” if deported back to their native countries.
The decision comes after the Supreme Court earlier this month permitted Trump administration officials to withdraw Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a distinct programme, for approximately 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants living and working in the United States.
Humanitarian parole programmes have been utilised for decades to assist immigrants fleeing war and other difficult conditions in their native countries to enter the United States, notably Cubans in the 1960s after the revolution.
In addition, the Biden administration launched a parole scheme in 2022 for Ukrainians who fled following Russia’s invasion.
