The US Supreme Court has again cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, pushing the total number of people who could be newly exposed to deportation to nearly 1 million.
The justices lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The court has also allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case.
The administration filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge in Boston blocked the administration’s push to end the protection programme.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that the effect of the high court’s order is “to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.
Jackson echoed what US District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in ruling that ending the legal protections early would leave people with a stark choice: flee the country or risk losing everything.
Talwani, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, found that revocations of parole can be done, but on a case-by-case basis.
Her ruling came in mid-April, shortly before permits were due to be cancelled. An appeals court refused to lift her order.
The Supreme Court’s order is not a final ruling, but it means the protections will not be in place while the case proceeds. It now returns to the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
The Justice Department argues that the protections were always intended to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court intervention.
The Trump administration claimed that Biden granted parole en masse, and the law does not require it to be ended on an individual basis.
Taking on each case individually would be a “gargantuan task,” and slow the government’s efforts to press for their removal, Solicitor General D John Sauer argued.
Biden used humanitarian parole more than any other president, employing a special presidential authority in effect since 1952.
Beneficiaries included the 532,000 people who have come to the US with financial sponsors since late 2022, leaving home countries fraught with “instability, dangers and deprivations,” as attorneys for the migrants said.
They had to fly to the US at their own expense and have a financial sponsor to qualify for the designation, which lasts for two years.
The Trump administration’s decision was the first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole, attorneys for the migrants said.
They called the Trump administration’s moves “the largest mass illegalisation event in modern American history.”
The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals the administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration.
The court has sided against Trump in other cases, including slowing his efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th-century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
Trump promised on the campaign trail to deport millions of people and, after taking office, has sought to dismantle Biden administration polices that created ways for migrants to live legally in the US.