The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
The Court, in an unsigned order, lifted a lower court order that kept a Biden-era humanitarian parole program in place. Humanitarian parole allows migrants from countries facing instability to enter the U.S. and secure work authorization as long as they have a private sponsor.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, arguing the majority had not properly considered “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.”
They argued the Court’s order will “have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
The order means the parole protections will not be in place as the case proceeds; it now heads back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston.
The decision comes after the Court previously allowed the Trump administration to revoke deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who were allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.
Both rulings are wins for the Trump administration, which is working to make good on the president’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations.
Republicans have argued the humanitarian parole program allowed immigrants who would otherwise not have qualified to enter the country, to remain in the country legally.
The Biden administration opened up humanitarian parole to Venezuelans in 2022 and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January 2023.
At the time, several red states sued the Biden administration looking to block the parole program, though the courts upheld its legality.
President Trump ordered an end to the humanitarian parole programs on his first day in office, leading migrants to challenge Trump’s directive in court. Attorneys for the migrants argued that the end of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”
The lawsuits resulted in a temporary pause of the Trump administration’s order in March, after a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Nome lacked the authority to revoke the parole for more than 500,000 people without providing case-by-case reviews.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling, Solicitor General D. John Sauer submitted an emergency application to the Supreme Court arguing that Noem has “broad discretion over categories of immigration determinations.”
Sauer further argued that the lower court had “needlessly” upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry” and had undone “democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”
Attorneys for the migrants called the Trump administration’s order “the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.”