Supreme Court Lets Trump Revoke ‘Parole’ Status For 500,000 Migrants
The U.S. Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to remove the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, supporting the Republican president’s push to increase deportations.

The court stayed the order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that halted the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 of these migrants by former President Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to immediate removal while the case is heard in lower courts.

The ruling was unsigned and did not justify, as is common with emergency court orders. Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, officially dissented.

Immigration parole is a type of temporary authorization granted by American law to enter the nation for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” which allows grantees to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s strategy for deterring illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump issued an executive order on January 20, his first day back in office, calling for the elimination of humanitarian parole programs. The Department of Homeland Security then attempted to terminate them in March, shortening the two-year parole awards. The government said that revoking parole would make it simpler to place migrants in an “expedited removal” procedure.

The lawsuit is one of many that the Trump administration has filed urgently with the nation’s highest court, seeking to overturn judgments by lower courts that hinder his sweeping plans, including those targeting immigration.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let it go ahead with ending legal protections for migrants from Syria. This was the latest emergency appeal to the highest court in the country.

The Department of Justice wants the court to overturn a New York judge’s decision that stopped the Department of Homeland Security from ending temporary protected status for Syrians while lawsuits are going on.

The government is also asking for a wider ruling that could affect other cases about protecting people from other countries as the administration tries to crack down on immigration.

According to court records, about 6,100 people from Syria have temporary legal status after leaving their homes because of armed conflict.

The International Refugee Assistance Project says that ending those protections could stop people from being able to work legally in the United States and put more people at risk of deportation, especially the 800 people who have applications pending.

The first protections for Syrians came in 2012, during a civil war that lasted more than ten years and ended with the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acted to revoke protected status less than a year later, finding that the situation “no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals.”

Immigration lawyers disagreed with that choice, saying that Syria was still dealing with a humanitarian crisis and that quickly taking away legal protections would force Syrians in the US to make “impossible choices.”

The administration says that the department can give or take away the temporary protections and that judges shouldn’t get involved.

The government must respond to the appeal by March 4.

DHS has taken steps to take away legal protections that let immigrants from many countries stay in the US and work legally.

That includes more than a million people from Venezuela and Haiti all together.

A different judge in Washington recently stopped the government from taking away protections for 350,000 Haitians.

The administration has won a number of cases on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, which lets it move forward with important parts of Trump’s agenda.

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