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.
Vance’s Announcement About Minnesota Fraud Will Push Democrats Off the Deep End
Where there’s widespread illegal activity from elected and appointed leaders in blue cities, Democrats are nearly always involved. Take, say, Minnesota.
Vice President JD Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration is temporarily suspending $259 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota due to concerns about widespread welfare fraud.
During a joint press conference, Vance and Oz explained that this funding freeze would affect federal matching funds for Minnesota’s healthcare program for low-income residents. This decision follows a recent audit of the state’s spending.
Vance, who President Donald Trump tapped to lead a national “war on fraud,” said the freeze ensures “the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax dollars.”
The VP further explained that “the federal payments that will go to the state government until the state government takes its obligations seriously to stop the fraud that’s being perpetrated against the American people.”
Trump Admin Asks SCOTUS to Allow Deportation of 350,000 Haitians
The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court of the United States on Wednesday to allow the administration to move forward with ending temporary deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants.
The request for emergency relief is the latest development in legal disputes stemming from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to terminate Temporary Protected Status for several countries. Ending the designation would make affected immigrants eligible for deportation.
The Supreme Court has previously allowed the administration to roll back similar protections for Venezuelan migrants, while a separate request involving Syrian immigrants remains pending before the court.
Haiti was first granted Temporary Protected Status in 2010 after a devastating earthquake killed more than 300,000 people and caused widespread destruction across the country.
During his first administration, President Donald Trump moved to rescind Haiti’s TPS designation. However, the decision became tied up in litigation and was not implemented before he left office.
After returning to the presidency for a second term, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced steps to end Haiti’s TPS designation, with the change scheduled to take effect Feb. 3.
In announcing the decision, Noem said ending the protections reflected “a necessary and strategic vote of confidence in the new chapter Haiti is turning” and aligned with the administration’s broader foreign policy approach toward a “secure, sovereign and self-reliant Haiti.” She acknowledged that some conditions in the country remained concerning but said certain areas were suitable for return.
In December, five Haitian nationals filed a lawsuit challenging the termination of TPS and sought to block the move. A federal district court granted their request last month, concluding in part that the decision to end the designation was likely motivated by racial animus, without providing any evidence to justify that determination.
“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee and first LGBTQ federal judge, wrote.
“Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that,” she added.
Noem has since been replaced as head of the Department of Homeland Security by Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullen. She is now serving as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
The DOJ appealed the ruling, but a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to block the lower court’s decision.
In its filing asking the Supreme Court of the United States to intervene, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the legal reasoning adopted by the lower court could undermine a wide range of immigration policies implemented by the administration,
CBS News reported.
Sauer wrote that the theory relied upon in the ruling could potentially invalidate “virtually every immigration policy of the current administration.”
Federal courts, he said, “are again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations, while crediting harms to respondents that inhere in the temporary nature of TPS.”
Temporary Protected Status was established by Congress in 1990 to provide temporary protections for individuals from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions that make returning unsafe.
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Individuals from countries designated for TPS generally cannot be deported while the designation remains in place and are eligible to obtain work authorization. The protections are typically granted for periods of up to 18 months and can be renewed if conditions in the designated country persist.
As part of his immigration policy agenda, President Donald Trump has moved to terminate TPS designations for immigrants from multiple countries. Those include Afghanistan, Haiti, Nicaragua, Somalia and Yemen, among others, CBS News noted.
