The US supreme court on Friday announced it would allow the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, bolstering the Republican president’s drive to step up deportations.
The court put on hold Boston-based US district judge Indira Talwani’s order halting the administration’s move to end the immigration humanitarian “parole” protections granted to 532,000 people by Donald Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to rapid removal from the country, while the detailed case plays out in lower courts.
As with many of the court’s emergency orders – after rapid appeals brought the case to their bench – the decision issued on Friday was unsigned and gave no reasoning. However two of the court’s three liberal-leaning justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, publicly dissented.
The court “botched” its assessment of whether the administration was entitled to freeze Talwani’s decision pending the litigation, Jackson wrote in an accompanying opinion.
The outcome, Jackson 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”.
Jackson also said that “it is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum pre-decision damage.”
She added that those living under parole protections in this case now face “two unbearable options”.
One option is to “elect to leave the United States and thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries,’ experience destructive ‘family separation’ and possibly ‘forfeit any opportunity to obtain a remedy based on their … claims”, Jackson wrote.
The other option is that they could remain in the US after parole termination and “risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences”.
To Jackson, “either choice creates significant problems for respondents that far exceed any harm to the government … At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgement regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to the kind of practical impact.”
Immigration parole is a form of temporary permission under American law to be in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”, allowing recipients to live and work in the US. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s approach to handling migrants entering at the US-Mexico border.
Such a status does not offer immigrants a long-term path towards citizenship but it can typically be renewed multiple times. A report from the American Immigration Council found that halting the program would, apart from the humanitarian effect, be a blow to th
