Supreme Court says Trump for now can revoke ‘immigration parole’ for 530K migrants

A divided Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way, for now, for the Trump administration to revoke the provisional legal status of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who have been allowed to live and work in the United States while their immigration cases play out.

Officials said Friday’s decision on “immigration parole” could affect about 530,000 migrants, though many of them may have obtained another legal status in the United States. Cubans, for instance, are eligible to apply for permanent residency and a path to citizenship under a 1966 federal law.

The decision is the second time this month the high court has given Trump officials permission to terminate programs that protect immigrants fleeing countries racked by war or economic turmoil while litigation on those programs continues. The justices also allowed the administration to revoke temporary protections that allowed a different group of nearly 350,000 Venezuelans to remain in the United States.

As is common with decisions on the court’s emergency docket, the majority did not explain on Friday why it was lifting a lower-court block on revoking the Biden-era parole program. The action came over a fiery dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by fellow liberal Sonia Sotomayor.

Jackson wrote that the government failed to meet the burden of proof required to pause the lower-court ruling, which is that leaving the parole program in place for now would cause irreparable harm.

“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson wrote. “It 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.”

Jackson warned that “social and economic chaos will ensue if that many noncitizen parolees are suddenly and summarily remanded” to their home countries. The migrants granted parole to enter the country have sponsors, Jackson wrote, and in many cases “have integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hopes of eventually securing long term legal status.”

Legal challenges to the Trump administration’s revocations of protected status will continue in lower courts, and could eventually reach the Supreme Court for full hearings on the merits. Immigrant advocates said President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the status and work permits for roughly 900,000 migrants is largely unprecedented.

It’s unclear how many of the migrants in the parole program could face deportation. Many who initially entered the United States with the provisional status have since moved on to other legal protections that remain in effect, such as asylum or permanent residency. Some have temporary protected status that the Trump administration has not revoked.

Those who did not secure new protections could be at risk of removal since humanitarian parole expires after two years and the Biden administration did not renew it. Biden officials warned immigrants in October to seek another legal status if they wanted to stay.

“Good to remember that we don’t know how many of the 500,000 parolees had already applied for other statuses such as asylum,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney at the Migration Policy Institute said on X after the ruling.

Phillip Brutus, a Haitian immigrant who served in the Florida legislature and now works in immigration law in the state, said Friday’s decision would “cut deep” and be enormously harmful. Though parolees knew their status would expire in two years, he said, the ongoing violence and political instability in Haiti have made returning dangerous for many.

Brutus said many of his clients have applied for asylum. But their work authorization is tied to their parole status, and reapplying for permission to work in the United States will take months.

“All of a sudden they can’t work,” he said. “You can’t buy groceries, you can’t pay for where you stay. Devastation is an understatement.”

Others, he said, have not applied for asylum and have been in the country for less than two years, meaning they could be subject to expedited removal. Going home for most Haitians, he said, is unthinkable.

“Somebody just sent me a video of where I grew up in Port-au-Prince,” Brutus said, recalling how he would go outside and play soccer and hide-and-seek. Now that street is strewed with garbage and overgrown trees.

“This is a destroyed country. There is nothing to go back to.”

Trump officials say the migrants are a public safety threat and a drain on the nation’s resources.

“Ending the … parole programs, as well as the paroles of those who exploited it, will be a necessary return to common sense policies, a return to public safety, and a return to America First,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

The administration filed its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after a judge in Massachusetts ruled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem could not issue a blanket ban on parole and had to review each migrant’s case individually, and an appeals court upheld that ruling.

“The district court has nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in his filing to the justices.

President Joe Biden started the humanitarian parole program in 2022 as a way to ease the crush of illegal crossings at the southern border, allow migrants to go through security screening and reduce the strain on Homeland Security resources. Each migrant in the program has to have a financial sponsor in the United States.

Trump officials have sharply criticized the program as part of their broader push to crack down on migration.

Eduardo Gamarra, a professor of political science at Florida International University, said the pair of Supreme Court emergency actions, coupled with new vows from the White House to arrest 3,000 migrants a day, has put people on edge in Miami, where there are large diasporas of Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.

“The only way you’re going to get 3,000 a day is if you send back the parolees, TPS, people with a legal limbo,” Gamarra said. (TPS is a reference to temporary protected status, which the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to revoke for a different large group of Venezuelans while their court challenge continues.)

A nonprofit organization and nearly two dozen migrants sued to block the ban on parole, saying that Noem had exceeded her authority and that the cancellation would cause “an immense amount of needless human suffering” if not for the district court’s stay.

“The Plaintiff class of approximately half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans lawfully in this country would have become undocumented, legally unemployable, and subject to mass expulsion on an expedited basis,” they wrote in their filing.

The case is one of a number of battles that have played out over Trump’s immigration policies on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. In mid-May, the justices extended a block on Trump using a wartime authority to deport migrants who are alleged gang members from Northern Texas and heard arguments related to nationwide injunctions and the president’s attempts to ban birthright citizenship.

Last week, they allowed Trump to revoke TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans while litigation continues. Many had applied for that program — which provides work permits and permission to stay for up to 18 months — after crossing the border illegally or entering the country via parole.

The high court also said in emergency orders that the Trump administration must facilitate the return of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Kilmar Abrego García is still being held there.

— — -

Armario reported from Miami. Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report.