350,000 more Venezuelans face deportation for a total of 880,000 migrants | Credits: SibRapid/Shutterstock
A US Supreme Court order gives President Donald Trump’s administration the power to strip legal protection from roughly 530,000 migrants, putting them at risk of deportation.
The ruling puts on hold a prior lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for the hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The BBC reported that justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, two of the court’s three liberal justices, dissented, removing the protection programme established by President Joe Biden for immigrants facing economic and political turmoil in their countries of origin. The decision comes after the court allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case, the Associated Press (AP) said.
The White House celebrated the ruling
Trump’s government recently filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge in Boston blocked their attempt to end the programme. The Justice Department has argued that the Biden-era protection was intended to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the authority to revoke it without court intervention.
Immediately after today’s court order, the White House “celebrated” the opportunity to deport 500,000 “invaders”, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN. “The Supreme Court justly stepped in”. Trump promised to deport millions of people when campaigning last year.
Humanitarian parole programmes have been used for decades in the US to allow immigrants fleeing war and other tumultuous conditions in their home countries to come to the country, including Cubans in the 1960s following the revolution.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told AP the Biden-era policies weren’t in line with immigration law. “We are confident in the legality of our actions to protect the American people and look forward to further action from the Supreme Court to vindicate us.”
‘How devastating this is’
But Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said the decision has “effectively greenlit” deportation orders for a half-million people.
“I cannot overstate how devastating this is,” she said. The court “allowed the Trump Administration to unleash widespread chaos, not just for our clients and class members, but for their families, their workplaces, and their communities.”
The Trump administration’s decision was the first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole, attorneys for the migrants said. They said Trump’s measures are “the largest mass illegalisation event in modern American history.”
