The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with revoking humanitarian parole protections for more than half a million migrants, a decision that could leave nearly one million people newly vulnerable to deportation as legal proceedings continue.
The justices lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The court has also allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case.
Republican President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to deport millions of people, and in office has sought to dismantle Biden administration polices that created ways for migrants to live legally in the U.S. Trump amplified false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio, including those with legal status under the humanitarian parole program, were abducting and eating pets during a debate with then-President Joe Biden, according to court documents.
His administration filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge in Boston blocked the administration's push to end the program.
Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that the effect of the high court's order is "to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims." Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.
Jackson echoed what U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in the ruling that ending the legal protections early would leave people with a stark choice: flee the country or risk losing everything. Talwani, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, found that revocations of parole can be done, but on a case-by-case basis.
Her ruling came in mid-April, shortly before permits were due to be canceled. An appeals court refused to lift her order.
The Supreme Court's order is not a final ruling, but it means the protections will not be in place while the case proceeds. It now returns to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
The Justice Department argues that the protections were always meant to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court interference. The administration says Biden granted the parole en masse, and the law doesn't require ending it on an individual basis.
Taking on each case individually would be a "gargantuan task," and slow the government's efforts to press for their removal, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued.
Biden used humanitarian parole more than any other president, employing a special presidential authority in effect since 1952.
Beneficiaries included the 532,000 people who have come to the United States with financial sponsors since late 2022, leaving home countries fraught with "instability, dangers and deprivations," as attorneys for the migrants said. They had to fly to the U.S. at their own expense and have a financial sponsor to qualify for the designation, which lasts for two years.
The Trump administration's decision was the first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole, attorneys for the migrants said. They called the Trump administration's moves "the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history."
The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals the administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration.
The court has sided against Trump in other cases, including slowing his efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th-century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
