The United States Supreme Court has granted the Trump administration permission to proceed with revoking the legal status of more than 500,000 migrants who entered the country under a humanitarian parole programme established by former President Joe Biden.
The court’s decision, issued on Friday, affects migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who were allowed to enter the US for a two-year period under the programme, which accepted up to 30,000 individuals per month.
The policy was designed to offer temporary relief to migrants fleeing countries with severe human rights challenges.
In a legal development that could lead to mass deportations, the conservative-leaning court lifted a lower court’s injunction that had blocked the administration’s efforts to end the program.
The unsigned Supreme Court order did not include any explanation for the decision.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
Jackson wrote, ‘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.
‘It is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum pre-decision damage’.
She added that those living under parole protections in this case now face “two unbearable options’.
One option is to ‘elect to leave the United States and thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries’, experience destructive ‘family separation’ and possibly ‘forfeit any opportunity to obtain a remedy based on their … claims, Jackson wrote.
The other option is that they could remain in the US after parole termination and “risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences’.
To Jackson, ‘either choice creates significant problems for respondents that far exceed any harm to the government. At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgement regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to the kind of practical impact’.
The parole programme has been a point of contention since Trump resumed office and reinstated his administration’s hardline stance on immigration.
His legal team argued that the programme exceeded the government’s authority under current immigration laws.
Lower courts had previously ruled in favour of maintaining the protections, stating that the administration’s interpretation of immigration law was flawed.
However, the Supreme Court’s latest decision allows the government to proceed with its plans while legal proceedings continue.
President Trump, who campaigned on promises to overhaul US immigration policy, has introduced a series of aggressive enforcement measures.
In one such effort, his administration invoked an obscure wartime law to deport Venezuelan nationals alleged to be gang members.
According to the BBC, humanitarian parole programmes have been used for decades to allow immigrants fleeing war and other tumultuous conditions in their home countries to come to the US, including Cubans in the 1960s following the revolution.
The Biden administration also established a parole programme in 2022 for Ukrainians fleeing after Russia’s invasion.
