US Supreme Court lets Trump revoke ‘parole' status for migrants
The US Supreme Court on Friday let President Donald Trump's administration revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, bolstering the Republican president's drive to step up deportations.
The court put on hold Boston-based US District Judge Indira Talwani order halting the administration's move to end the immigration 'parole' granted to 532,000 of these migrants by Trump's predecessor Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to rapid removal, while the case plays out in lower courts.
As with many of the court's orders issued in an emergency fashion, the decision was unsigned and gave no reasoning. Two of the court's three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, publicly dissented.
The court botched its assessment of whether the administration was entitled to freeze Talwani's decision pending the litigation, Jackson wrote in an accompanying opinion.
The outcome, Jackson wrote, 'undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million non-citizens while their legal claims are pending'.
Homeland Security personnel inside the loading dock of the Varick Street ICE facility in New York. Photo: EPA-EFE
Immigration parole is a form of temporary permission under American law to be in the country for 'urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit', allowing recipients to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration's approach by to deter illegal immigration at the US-Mexican border.
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