The ruling means that people in Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaraguan can be targeted for deportation as the lawsuit continues.
The conservative US Supreme Court handed another big victory to President Donald Trump, allowing his administration to revoke temporary legal status from more than half a million immigrants as legal agenda continues in the lower courts.
Friday’s decision applies to hundreds of thousands of people in Venezuelan, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaraguan who were given humanitarian parole under former President Joe Biden.
That parole status allowed them to enter the United States for emergencies and emergency humanitarian reasons: instability in their own country, violence, political oppression.
However, the Supreme Court’s decision means that beneficiaries of humanitarian parole could be targeted for deportation prior to a final decision on whether revoking immigrant status is legal.
The Supreme Court ruling, which is controlled by six or three people by conservatives, reverses a lower court order that temporarily suspends the Trump administration from yanking humanitarian parole from Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
The Supreme Court decision was not signed and did not provide inference. However, the two liberal justice on the panel publicly opposed.
The results “underestimate the devastating consequences of allowing the government to seriously overturn the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million non-citizens while legal claims are pending,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
She noted that some of the affected individuals showed in court applications that if their humanitarian parole was shortened, they would face serious harm.
Trump is targeting programs like humanitarian parole as part of his efforts to limit immigration to the United States. His administration accused Biden of “broad abuse” in calling for humanitarian parole. Trump said Biden is loose on immigration and oversees US “invasions” from abroad.
Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has suspended applications for asylum and other forms of immigration relief indefinitely.
Plaintiffs in Friday’s humanitarian parole case warned the Supreme Court that if they were not allowed to seek other paths for immigration and were forced to leave the country, they could face life-threatening circumstances.
If they were deported “to the same tyrannical and unstable country that they fled,” the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that “many would face serious risks of danger, persecution, and even death.”
In early May, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to terminate another temporary immigration route, the Temporary Protection Status (TPS), for the roughly 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States. TPS allows non-citizens to remain in the United States, but they remain concerned that the situation in their home country is unsafe.
As in Friday, the Supreme Court ruling on TPS allowed the Trump administration to advance rescue, but legal challenges to Trump’s policies took place in lower courts.
Biden had encouraged the use of programs such as TPS and humanitarian parole as an alternative to undocumented immigration to the United States.
Humanitarian parole, for example, allowed recipients to live legally and work in the United States for two years. Trump’s efforts to end the program will shorten that time frame.
Countries in question – Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti have experienced significant economic and political crises in recent years.
In Venezuela, for example, critics accused President Nicolas Maduro of detaining and extincting political dissidents and activists, and economic collapse caused radical expansion of basic necessities beyond the measures of many Venezuelans. Millions of people have fled the country in recent years.
Haiti, one of the other countries, has been destroyed by a surge in gang violence since President Jovental Moys was assassinated in 2021. Since then, no federal elections have been held, and gangs have used violence to fill the vacuum of power.
According to the United Nations, 90% of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is under gang control, killing thousands.