The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to proceed with efforts to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, a move that could expose nearly 1 million people to deportation.
The justices lifted a lower-court order that had maintained humanitarian parole protections for over 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. This decision follows a separate case where the court allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status for approximately 350,000 Venezuelan migrants.
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The Trump administration, which has prioritized increased deportations and the dismantling of Biden-era immigration policies, filed an emergency appeal after a federal judge in Boston blocked its attempt to end the humanitarian parole program.
President Donald Trump has frequently spoken of deporting millions and, according to court documents, amplified false claims about Haitian immigrants under the parole program during a debate with President Joe Biden.
In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote that the court’s order means “to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
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Jackson’s sentiment echoed U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of former President Barack Obama. Talwani had ruled in mid-April that ending the protections prematurely would force individuals into a dire choice: flee the U.S. or risk losing everything. She found that while parole could be revoked, it should be done on a case-by-case basis. An appeals court had previously declined to lift Talwani’s order.
Friday’s Supreme Court order is not a final ruling on the merits of the case. However, it means the humanitarian parole protections will not be in effect as the legal challenge continues. The case now returns to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
The Justice Department, representing the Trump administration, argued that the humanitarian parole protections were always intended to be temporary and that the Department of Homeland Security has the authority to revoke them en masse without judicial interference. Solicitor General D. John Sauer contended that individual case reviews would be a “gargantuan task” and would significantly slow government efforts to remove these individuals.
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The humanitarian parole program, a special presidential authority in effect since 1952, was utilized more extensively by the Biden administration. Since late 2022, approximately 532,000 individuals from countries marked by “instability, dangers and deprivations” entered the U.S. under this program. To qualify, they had to secure a financial sponsor in the U.S. and cover their own travel expenses for a two-year parole period.
Attorneys for the migrants described the Trump administration’s move as the “first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole” and potentially “the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.”
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