The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that the Trump administration can revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The temporary legal status granted to 532,000 people from those countries was granted during the administration of former President Joe Biden, starting in 2022, and included permission for them to temporarily live and work in the United States.
The so-called CHNV, a conditional release program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, was implemented in part to ease the sudden influx of immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. It allowed people who passed a security clearance to enter the United States legally and stay for two years, as long as they had a sponsor who could provide them with housing.
But the Supreme Court overturned a lower court order that had upheld those humanitarian parole protections, and in a separate case, the nation’s highest court also allowed the government to revoke the temporary legal status of 350,000 more Venezuelan migrants.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of Massachusetts initially ruled that the Trump administration could not revoke each person’s status without an individualized decision.
The Supreme Court disagreed, and while Friday’s decision is not final, it means that protections for more than half a million immigrants from those four countries will not remain in place while the lawsuit continues.
Liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with Jackson writing that the court failed to consider “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to abruptly upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
The case now heads back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston.
