A federal judge said she will block President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s decision to cut short a two-year parole granted to the migrants under Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, was based on an incorrect reading of the law.
The administration’s action, announced in a Federal Register notice published last month, marked an expansion of the Republican president’s hardline crackdown on immigration.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said the administration wanted to expose about 450,000 people to expedited deportation effective April 24 based on a wrong interpretation of the statute governing the process.
She said that law focused on people who illegally crossed the border and providing a means to remove them on an expedited basis, not individuals who were granted permission to enter the United States under a grant of parole.
“What you’re prioritizing is not people coming over the border but the people who followed the rules,” Talwani said.
Laura Flores-Perilla, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with the immigrant rights group Justice Action Center, said she hoped the judge would move quickly to finalize her decision halting an unprecedented mass termination of migrants’ parole status.
She said the Biden-era humanitarian parole programs had been essential to allowing people fleeing danger or persecution in their home countries to establish a life for themselves and for their families in the United States.
“The stakes are quite high,” Flores-Perilla told reporters outside the courthouse. “These are human lives at stake, and the urgency is very much there.”
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the Department of Justice immediately responded to a request for comment.
Immigrant rights advocates had sued to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to pause various Biden-era parole programs that have allowed Ukrainian, Afghan, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants to enter the country.
But while the case was pending, the administration moved to end the two-year parole granted to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelan migrants, meaning they would no longer have lawful status in the U.S.
Biden launched a parole entry program for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those countries.
Brian Ward, a lawyer with the Justice Department, said during Thursday’s hearing that the parole programs had always been discretionary and that there was nothing requiring U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to revoke parole on an individual, case-by-case basis.
Talwani indicated she would not require the programs to continue to accept new applicants as “it is not my job to get into the larger policy question.”
But she said she found the administration’s rationale for revoking the status of people already in the country lawfully confusing and said she would work to get an order out urgently pausing the Federal Register notice.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond and Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
