The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end, for now, legal protections for more than 500,000 Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants with a ruling that liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted in a dissent as deeply harmful.
The decision puts on hold a ruling from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who in April issued a stay on the Trump administration's move to end a humanitarian program extended to this group under former U.S. President Joe Biden. The ruling means the immigrants are at risk of being deported under President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort, even as the core legal issues in the case continue to play out in lower courts.
The unsigned order from the Supreme Court focuses on the so-called CHNV parole program, which allows certain individuals from those four nations to apply for entry into the U.S. for a temporary stay, so long as they have a U.S.-based sponsor, go through security vetting, and meet other conditions. In some cases, beneficiaries of the program work in the U.S.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order instructing the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security to "[t]erminate all categorical parole programs," including CHNV.
"The court has plainly botched this assessment today. It requires next to nothing from the government with respect to irreparable harm" wrote Jackson in her dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives of and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending."
Friday's ruling is the second time this month that the Supreme Court has permitted the Trump administration to halt a program aimed at protecting immigrants who leave their home countries for humanitarian reasons. Earlier in May, the court issued an unsigned order allowing Trump to cancel Temporary Protected Status protections specifically extended to 350,000 Venezuelans immigrants while the legal case winds its way through lower courts.
The court's decision on Friday is a temporary order and litigation is still playing out, but it signals that a majority of the justices think the Trump administration is likely to prevail in the case, according to The New York Times.
"Respondents now face two unbearable options," according to Jackson's dissent. Jackson wrote that immigrants in the program could either choose to leave the U.S. and potentially confront dangers in their home countries, and other adverse outcomes, or "risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences."
"The court allows the government to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process," she concludes in the dissent.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote: "an incredibly devastating decision which simply ignores the human costs and blesses the Trump admin's stripping of status of hundreds of thousands of people who entered the country legally."
Josh Gerstein, a legal reporter at Politico, wrote that the ruling "may spell trouble for Ukrainians/Afghans with similar status."