Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration to End Biden-Era Migrant Program for Now

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.

The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”

The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.

Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.

Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.

Humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., are two different mechanisms by which migrants from troubled countries can be temporarily settled in the United States. Humanitarian parole is typically obtained by individuals who apply on a case-by-case basis, while T.P.S. is more often extended to large groups of migrants for a period of time. Individuals can hold both statuses at the same time.

Between the two rulings, the justices have agreed that, for now, the Trump administration can proceed with plans to deport hundreds of thousands of people who had fled war-torn and instable homelands and legally taken refuge in the United States.

The use of humanitarian parole has a decades-long history. It was used to admit nearly 200,000 Cubans during the 1960s and more than 350,000 Southeast Asians after the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War.

The Biden administration announced a humanitarian parole program in April 2022 for Ukrainians seeking to flee after the Russian invasion.

Biden officials then introduced the program for Venezuelans in late 2022 and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January 2023. With a stalemate in Congress over immigration and a sharp rise in border crossings, the programs cleared the way for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from those nations to enter the country legally.

Biden officials had hoped that the programs would encourage immigrants to fly to the United States and apply for entry in an organized fashion, instead of traveling north by foot and crossing the border illegally.

When the program was adopted for Venezuelans, official ports of entry had been closed to migrants since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which had provided additional incentive for those intent on reaching the country to take more dangerous routes and cross the border illegally.

After the administration introduced its policy, Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants at the border from those countries dropped sharply.

Republican lawmakers have pushed back sharply against the humanitarian parole programs, arguing that they allowed migration by those who would not have otherwise qualified to enter the country.

Texas and other Republican-led states filed lawsuits while Mr. Biden was in office seeking to block the parole program, arguing that it burdened them by adding costs for health care, education and law enforcement. The courts upheld the programs’ legality.

President Trump moved to end the humanitarian parole programs for people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti on his first day back in office.

So far, the Trump administration has not tried to revoke the status of 240,000 Ukrainians who received humanitarian parole, though it has paused consideration of new applications under that program.

Lawyers for migrants then sued. They argued that the termination of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”

A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily paused the administration’s revocation of the program in March, finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to categorically revoke parole for all 532,000 people without providing individualized, case-by-case reviews.

On May 5, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s temporary block on the administration, finding that Ms. Noem had not made a “strong showing” that her “categorical termination” of humanitarian parole for all migrants was likely to survive a court challenge.

In an emergency application to the Supreme Court on May 8, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Ms. Noem had “broad discretion over categories of immigration determinations” and that federal immigration law permitted the secretary “to revoke that parole” whenever its purposes had been served.

By blocking the Trump administration from ending the programs, the lower court had “needlessly” upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry” and had undone “democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election,” Mr. Sauer argued.

Lawyers for the immigrants filed a brief with the court arguing that Ms. Noem’s decision to end the parole protections “contravened express limits on her authority” and that siding with the Trump administration would “cause an immense amount of needless human suffering” for the immigrants.

The lawyers for the immigrants added: “All of them followed the law and the rules of the U.S. government, and they are here to reunite with family and/or to escape, even temporarily, the instability, dangers and deprivations of their home countries.”