The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to end temporary legal status for more than 500,000 migrants who were granted protection during the Biden administration, putting them at risk of deportation.
The decision issued on Friday grants the Department of Homeland Security reprieve from a lower court’s ruling that blocked it from ending a temporary parole program without considering each immigrant’s case individually.
The program, called the CHNV program, extended temporary parole to migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who could pass vetting and had a sponsor in the U.S. for two years. The Biden administration started the program in 2022, and Donald Trump then issued an executive order shortly after taking office that instructed DHS to end the program.
Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, writing that the court did not take into account the chaos that would ensue from ending the program.
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“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson wrote. “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.”
She added it’s “apparent that the Government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage,” which the court should have stopped.
The administration argued in its original request that the DHS secretary has the lawful authority to end such programs without a case-by-case evaluation, and that the courts have interfered with the administration’s ability to oversee immigration policy.
“Respondents cannot claim any cognizable irreparable harm; they accepted parole with full awareness that the benefit was temporary, discretionary, and revocable at any time,” DHS argued.
The decision comes after a previous ruling that allowed the Trump administration to end a different form of temporary status for Venezuelans — another program that under the Biden administration had been used to extend status to people from unstable countries.
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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