Over 500,000 migrants at risk of deportation after US Supreme Court allows Trump to revoke their legal status

The US Supreme Court on Friday (May 30) allowed the Trump Administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua.

The top court’s move has put some 532,000 immigrants at risk of deportation who came to the US under the “parole” program launched by former president Joe Biden.

Under the parole program, 30,000 migrants from the four nations were allowed entry into the United States on the grounds of human rights.

However, US President Donald Trump’s crackdown against immigration has sought to get rid of the legal protections, with the matter reaching the Supreme Court earlier this month. The Trump administration has asked the top court to lift a court order blocking it from ending those protections.

The court put on hold the order given by US District Judge Indira Talwani that halted Trump’s move to end immigration “parole” given to foreign nationals. Issued in an emergency manner, the order was unsigned and did not provide any reasoning.

‘Devastating consequences’

Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, expressed their dissent from the top court’s decision, warning of “devastating consequences” of upending the “lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending,” according to the document.

“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” they wrote.

The migrants under the Biden era programme “now face two unbearable options. On the one hand, they could elect to leave the United States and, thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries,’ experience destructive ‘family separation,’” and possibly forfeit any chance of remedy based on their claims, they said.

“On the other, they could remain in the United States ... and risk imminent removal at the hands of Government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences.”

The administration was acting on a flawed interpretation of immigration law, the lower courts that blocked Trump’s moves argued.

On May 19, the Supreme Court also let Trump end temporary protection status granted to about 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States under the Biden administration. Trump invoked an obscure wartime law to deport hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.