On Friday, the Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump’s administration the authority 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 Supreme Court sided with Trump’s efforts to revoke immigrants’ temporary legal status, despite Trump’s continued criticism of the federal judiciary.
The Supreme Court previously allowed the administration to revoke another temporary program that granted work permits to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
The court’s brief order was not signed and, as is common on its emergency docket, did not provide any reasoning. Two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the decision.
Though the Supreme Court’s emergency decision is not final; the underlying legal case will be heard in lower courts, the order will allow the administration to expedite deportations for an estimated 530,000 migrants who previously benefited from the program. An unknown number of those beneficiaries may have sought additional forms of protection or immigration relief.
“I cannot overstate how devastating this is,” said Karen Tumlin, founder and director of the Justice Action Center, which was part of the legal team that represented 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 authored by Jackson and joined by Sotomayor, the court’s junior liberal member stated that her colleagues had “plainly botched” the formula used to determine whether lifting a lower court ruling would have negative consequences for parties involved in a dispute, particularly one involving scores of individuals facing immediate deportation to countries from which they fled.
The majority’s decision, according to her, “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 as a dissenter.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Friday that the administration is pleased that the migrants “can now be deported because the Supreme Court justly stepped in and stopped these crazy lower court injunctions.”
According to Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, the ruling significantly increases the number of migrants from the four countries who could face removal by the Trump administration, despite the fact that many would likely object to being returned to their home country.
“In that sense, the ruling is likely to raise the already high stakes of another emergency case brought by the Trump administration before the Supreme Court. In that case, Trump is requesting that the justices allow the government to deport migrants to countries other than their home without giving them a meaningful opportunity to contest their deportation,” Vladeck said.
Parole program dates to Eisenhower era
Since the 1950s, federal immigration law has allowed an administration to “parole” certain migrants who arrive at the border for humanitarian or other reasons.
For example, during a Soviet crackdown after World War II, the Eisenhower administration released tens of thousands of people fleeing Hungary. Paroled migrants can legally live and work in the country for up to two years, but their status is only temporary.
In 2023, the Biden administration announced that qualified migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela would be granted parole if they submitted to authorities for review rather than attempting to enter the country illegally.
Applicants were required to have an American sponsor and pass a security screening. On his first day in office, Trump signed an order aimed at unilaterally terminating the program.
Nobody 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 can revoke all migrants’ statuses with a single stroke of a pen, or if each migrant must be reviewed on an individual basis. Though the two sides disagree on 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 terminating the migrants’ parole status was one of the “most consequential immigration policy decisions” it had made.
The administration claimed that lower court orders temporarily blocking its policy undermined “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 halted the administration’s efforts to end the program entirely. She stated that the administration may still end parole for individuals after a case-by-case review. In 2013, former President Barack Obama nominated Talwani to the bench.
On May 5, a federal appeals court in Boston declined to block Talwani’s temporary order. The order from a panel of three judges – two appointed by former President Joe Biden and a third by former President Barack Obama – expressed doubt that Noem had the authority to end the parole program completely.
The parole program case was one of more than a dozen emergency appeals heard by the Supreme Court since Trump took office in January, including several involving immigration.
On May 15, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the president’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, as well as lower courts’ ability to temporarily block him from doing so.
The court ordered 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 from quickly deporting a group of Venezuelans in northern Texas under a broad 18th-century wartime authority.
