- Wednesday, June 04, 2025
The court order ends the Biden administration’s ‘parole’ program that gave temporary legal status to 532,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela
By: India Weekly
THE US supreme court on Friday (30) allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, making them subject to deportation.
This ends the previous Biden administration’s ‘parole’ program that gave 532,000 people from the four countries permission to temporarily live and work in the United States.
The program, started in 2022, allowed people to enter the country and stay if they passed a security check and had a sponsor in the United States who could provide housing.
Similar parole programs were done earlier for people from certain other countries, including those fleeing violence in Ukraine and Afghanistan.
The brief order noted that two judges had dissented. The emergency order was not signed and no reasoning was given in it.
One of the dissenting judges, Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the court had failed to take into account “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.”
US President Donald Trump had sought elimination of legal protections under the ‘parole’ and the case reached the supreme court.
The administration had contested a ruling by Massachusetts-based US District Judge Indira Talwani, who said the administration could not sweep each person’s status away without an individualized determination.
That decision is now on hold while litigation continues.
Assistant Homeland Security secretary Tricia McLaughlin welcomed the decision and said it has corrected an error made by the Biden administration to allow “poorly vetted aliens” into the country.
“The Supreme Court has effectively greenlit deportation orders for an estimated half a million people, the largest such de-legalization in the modern era,” said Karen Tumlin, a lawyer at Justice Action Center who represents affected immigrants.
