- On Friday, the Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to cancel an immigration parole program that gave legal status to 530,000 migrants.
- The Biden-era program grant two-year work permits to Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants.
- Now all 530,000 immigrants face imminent deportation — unless they can quickly work out other paths to citizenship.
A majority ruling from the Supreme Court on Friday ultimately paved the way for the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan immigrants, reports The Washington Post.
Such migrants entered the United States through a Biden-era program that allowed immigrants to enter the United States on two-year work permits. Officials said that about 530,000 migrants will be forced from the program, though they are eligible for other paths to citizenship.
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, per The Associated Press
In the meantime, these migrants are now in the United States illegally and at risk of deportation.
The Supreme Court’s one-paragraph order lifts a prior ruling from a federal judge, who had attempted to prevent the program cancellation.
“We had a great decision from the Supreme Court, thank goodness,” Trump said in response to the ruling. “That was very important.”
Why remove the program?
Former President Joe Biden started the program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in 2022. That year, the U.S.-Mexico border was “chao(tic)... disorganized,” reported Politico. The Biden administration estimated about 2.76 million illegal crossings — more than any year before.
The work permit, or legal parole program, stemmed the flood of immigrants and gave them a legal pathway to the United States. Such a move was not popular with many Americans who claimed that gang-affiliated migrants were filling their communities.
Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign seized on the unpopularity of the program.
“On day one of my new administration, I’ll stop all of the migrant flights into our country,” he promised rally attendees at a Wisconsin campaign stop.
Advocates for immigrants have not rested easy with Trump’s attempts to fulfill his promises. Critics filed a federal lawsuit against an executive order he issued in January to revoke the parole program. That was in February. In April, another judge delayed the order, insisting that Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem “must attend, in some way, to the reasons an individual alien received parole” — meaning immigrant cases must be personally and individually considered before they are denied entrance to the United States.
The issue then moved to the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the Trump administration at a 7-2 vote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson wrote in a dissenting statement. “It 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.”
Jackson also included in her statement that “social and economic chaos will ensue” once migrants are returned home because they have, in many cases, already “integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hopes of eventually securing long-term legal status.”