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Boston Globe

Migrants in US face more uncertainty after Supreme Court ruling

Immigration lawyers reported that they had been fielding calls from families asking whether they should continue to go to work or school. Their clients, they say, were given permission to live and work temporarily in the United States. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : Advertisement Now, with that permission revoked while legal challenges work their way through lower courts, many immigrants fear that any encounter with police or other government agencies could lead to deportation, according to lawyers and community leaders. Guerline Jozef, executive director of immigrant rights nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, said some Afghan, Haitian and Ukrainian families were already planning to migrate north to Canada, as about 30,000 Haitian families had done in 2017 during the first Trump administration. Jozef said thousands of Haitians who had followed the protocol set by the U.S. government for humanitarian parole felt blindsided by the Supreme Court decision. 'They feel they can no longer survive in the United States,' she said. Advertisement The court Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke temporary legal status granted during the Biden administration to more than 530,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The decision was a response to an emergency request by the Department of Homeland Security, effectively killing a program that had granted humanitarian parole to nationals from those four countries. Beneficiaries were able to fly directly to the United States and remain for two years if they had passed background checks and secured a U.S. sponsor. Related : The largest number of recipients are from Haiti, with 213,140, and Venezuela, with 120,760, according to official data. But how many of the parole recipients would be immediately vulnerable to deportation is difficult to know because some have applied for other legal pathways or deportation protections. Last week, a federal judge in Boston blocked Trump officials from pausing renewal of applications for many of those programs. An unknown number of migrants have also applied for asylum or for what is known as Temporary Protected Status. While a Supreme Court decision earlier this month revoked that protection for an estimated 350,000 Venezuelans, it is still valid for Haitians until Aug. 3. And the Supreme Court's ruling that the government could not summarily deport people, as the Trump administration did in the case of more than 100 people sent to El Salvador, has effectively mandated a measure of due process for people facing deportation. Related : 'No one can be put on a plane immediately,' said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. 'People may have ongoing court cases or pending applications for relief, such as asylum.' Advertisement Still, in Austin, Texas, Kate Lincoln Goldfinch, an immigration lawyer, said she had been advising her clients for months to apply for multiple forms of protection. 'My concern is ICE is going to be moving to remove all of these people as quickly as possible without due process,' she said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Extra protection wasn't enough for Belen, 47, a teacher from Venezuela. She arrived in the United States in late 2022, one of the early beneficiaries of the Biden humanitarian parole program. The following year, she applied for Temporary Protected Status, after President Joe Biden declared that conditions in her home country made it risky for nationals to return. She thought TPS would give her an extra layer of security until her partner's asylum application was approved and he could sponsor her for a green card. But the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration's decision to revoke TPS for Venezuelans. And Friday, the court allowed the administration to revoke humanitarian parole for Venezuelans and others. 'I never thought it would come to this,' said Belen, who spoke on the condition that she not be identified by name because she is concerned about being targeted by immigration enforcement officials. Belen, who works as a special-education teacher, said she was planning to meet with a lawyer to figure out her next steps. 'If there is no solution, I will return to my country because I don't want to remain here illegally.' For Jerome, the end of protections for many Haitians could upend not only his community in Ohio but the lives of many people in Haiti who depend on relatives in the United States for support. Advertisement He works nights at an Amazon distribution center, and his partner, Muriel, works days. While they have both filed asylum applications recently, their fate remained unclear, he said. 'If my work permit is cut off, how will I send money to my father and family?' Jerome said Friday. 'Sometimes I have thought of going to Canada, but I don't have family there to receive me,' he said. 'I have only distant cousins.' Jerome said that he had also heard that people who tried to cross the northern border were being detained. Only those with documents attesting to close kin living there were allowed to enter. In New York, Sandra Sayago is a co-owner of El Budare Café along a stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens that has turned into a hub for Venezuelans who have arrived in the country in recent years. 'I think most Venezuelans are wondering day by day about what will happen,' Sayago said, expressing frustration over the nation's rapidly shifting immigration policies. She added, 'We're in limbo.' The end of the parole program is likely to ripple through the U.S. economy as employers are forced to let its beneficiaries go. 'This will have a massive impact on businesses,' said Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization. 'It will be a huge destabilizing moment for the economy,' she said. A large senior living provider in northern Virginia, Goodwin Living, has 65 workers with some form of temporary status that allows them to live and work in the United States. Among the 13 Haitians employed there, four are vulnerable following Friday's court decision, according to Lindsay Hutter, chief strategy and marketing officer. Advertisement 'It gives us heartache that these team members contributing to our economy, supporting the residents of our senior living communities and contributing to the fabric of our society in Virginia are now at risk of returning to an environment that is precarious and dangerous,' she said. 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