CNN
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The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to suspend a Biden-era humanitarian parole program that allowed half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to temporarily live and work in the United States.
It was the second time this month that the high court sided with Trump’s efforts to revoke temporary legal status for immigrants – even as Trump has continued to rail against the federal judiciary. The Supreme Court previously cleared the way for the administration to revoke another temporary program that provided work permits to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
The court’s brief order was not signed and, as if often the case on its emergency docket, did not offer any reasoning. Two liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented from the decision.
Though the emergency decision from the Supreme Court is not final – the underlying legal case will continue in lower courts – the order will allow the administration to expedite deportations for an estimated 530,000 migrants who had previously benefited from the program. An unknown number of those beneficiaries may have applied for other forms of protection or immigration relief.
“I cannot overstate how devastating this is,” said Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, which was part of the legal team representing the migrants. “The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to unleash widespread chaos, not just for our clients and class members, but for their families, their workplaces, and their communities.”
In a scathing dissent penned by Jackson and joined by Sotomayor, the court’s junior liberal member said her colleagues had “plainly botched” the formula used to decide whether lifting a lower court ruling would have negative consequences for parties involved in a dispute, particularly one involving scores of individuals at immediate risk of deportation to countries they fled.
The majority’s decision, she wrote, “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.”
“The court has now apparently determined that the equity balance weighs in the government’s favor, and, I suppose, that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims,” Jackson wrote in dissent.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Friday that the administration is celebrating the fact that the migrants “can now be deported because the Supreme Court justly stepped in and stopped these crazy lower court injunctions.”
The ruling dramatically increases the number of migrants from the four countries who could be subject to removal by the Trump administration, even though many would likely object to being returned to their home country, according to Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“In that sense, the ruling is likely to raise the already high stakes of another emergency case from the Trump administration pending before the Supreme Court. In that case, Trump is asking the justices to allow the government to remove migrants to countries other than their homeland without providing them a meaningful opportunity to contest their removal,” Vladeck said.
Federal immigration law since the 1950s has allowed an administration to “parole” certain migrants arriving at the border for humanitarian and other reasons. The Eisenhower administration, for instance, paroled tens of thousands of people fleeing Hungary during a Soviet crackdown after World War II. Paroled migrants may legally live and work in the country typically for two years, though their status is temporary.
The Biden administration announced in 2023 that it would grant parole to qualified migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who submitted to review by authorities rather than attempting to enter the country illegally. Applicants were required to have an American sponsor and clear security vetting. Trump signed an order on his first day in office seeking to unilaterally end the program.
No one disputes that, under federal law, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has broad authority to grant or revoke parole status. The question is whether the department may revoke the status for all migrants immediately with the stroke of a pen, or whether the agency must conduct a case-by-case review of each migrant. Though the two sides dispute the facts, the Biden administration appears to have conducted at least some individual review of each migrant before granting parole.
The Trump administration told the Supreme Court that its decision to terminate parole status for the migrants at issue was one of the “most consequential immigration policy decisions” it has made. Lower court orders temporarily blocking its policy, the administration said, upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core executive branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”
After a group of migrants who benefited from the program sued, US District Judge Indira Talwani temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out its effort to end the program wholesale. The administration, she said, could still end parole for individuals after a case-by-case review. Former President Barack Obama nominated Talwani to the bench in 2013.
A federal appeals court in Boston declined to block Talwani’s temporary order on May 5. The order from a panel of three judges – two appointees of former President Joe Biden and a third appointed by former President Barack Obama – expressed skepticism that Noem had the power to categorically end the parole program.
The parole program case was among more than a dozen emergency appeals that have reached the Supreme Court since Trump took office in January, including several that involve immigration. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on May 15 about the president’s efforts to end birthright citizenship – and the power of lower courts to temporarily block him from doing so.
The court required the administration to “facilitate” the return of a Salvadoran national mistakenly deported to El Salvador earlier this year. The court has also repeatedly barred the administration – for now – from rapidly deporting a group of Venezuelans in northern Texas under a sweeping 18th century wartime authority.
CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details.
