Federal judge blocks Trump admin from pulling Biden-era migrant protections
A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration on Wednesday from revoking Biden -era temporary migrant protections and ordered officials to resume applications.
Why it matters: The ruling that comes as the Trump administration is moving to escalate its hardline immigration crackdown affects thousands of people who came to the country legally via temporary programs from Afghanistan, Latin America and Ukraine.
Driving the news: A lawsuit is challenging the suspension of processing applications for people from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
State of play: President Trump in January ordered the Homeland Security Department to terminate Biden-era "parole" programs that allowed people from certain countries to temporarily live and work in the U.S. due to humanitarian or public interest grounds.
U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in her order accepted that the Trump administration has broad discretion on immigration policy, but said it was not wholly shielded from judicial review.
The judge in Boston, Massachusetts, made a similar order in April regarding people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela given temporary legal status under the CHNV Program, which the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to overrule.
"This court emphasizes, as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families," Talwani said Wednesday.
What they're saying: "This ruling reaffirms what we have always known to be true: our government has a legal obligation to respect the rights of all humanitarian parole beneficiaries and the Americans who have welcomed them into their communities," said Anwen Hughes, a lawyer for Human Rights First, which is representing plaintiffs in the case, in a statement Wednesday.
The other side: Attorneys for the Justice Department in its appeal to the Supreme Court on Talwani's April ruling said that order "blocks the Executive Branch from exercising its discretionary authority over a key aspect of the Nation's immigration and foreign policy and thwarts Congress's express vesting of that decision in the Secretary, not courts."
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