The Supreme Court on Friday again cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, pushing the total number of people who could be newly exposed to deportation to nearly 1 million.
The justices lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The court has also allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case.
Trump’s administration filed an emergency appeal after a federal judge in Boston blocked its push to end the program.
In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority is having “the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
Starting in 2022, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted what is called parole for two years to people from the affected countries in part to alleviate the surge arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The policy, known as the CHNV parole programs, allowed people who passed a security check and who had a sponsor in the United States who could provide housing, to enter the country and stay.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in court papers that Talwani did not have authority to rule on the issue, with Noem given authority to make her decision under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.
