Trump asks US Supreme Court to allow revocation of migrants' legal status

By Andrew Chung, John Kruzel

President Donald Trump's administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to intervene in its bid to revoke the temporary legal status granted by his predecessor Joe Biden to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States.

The Justice Department requested that the justices put on hold Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani's order halting the administration's move to terminate the immigration "parole" granted to the migrants under Biden. The move is part of Trump's hardline approach to immigration.

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.

In their filing to the Supreme Court, Justice Department lawyers argued that Talwani's order had upended "critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry," effectively "undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election" that returned Trump to the presidency.

The Republican president called for ending these programs in an executive order signed on January 20, his first day back in office. The Department of Homeland Security subsequently moved to terminate the programs in March, including cutting short the two-year parole grants for about 400,000 people.

The Trump administration "is hellbent on punishing nearly half a million people who did everything the government asked of them" in applying for parole, said Karen Tumlin, director of the immigrant rights legal group Justice Action Center, which helped represent the plaintiffs who challenged the parole termination.

"Everyone - sponsors, beneficiaries, communities and the economy alike - benefit from humanitarian parole," Tumlin added.

The Supreme Court directed the plaintiffs to respond to the administration's request by May 15. The filing is the latest in a flood of emergency requests by Trump's administration seeking to undo decisions by judges impeding his sweeping policies, including several targeting immigrants.

In a bid to reduce illegal crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico, Biden starting in 2022 allowed Venezuelans who entered the United States by air to request a two-year parole if they passed security checks and had a U.S. financial sponsor. Biden, a Democrat, later expanded that process to Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans.

A total of about 530,000 people were given immigration parole through Biden's policy.

The Trump administration said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place migrants in a fast-track deportation process called "expedited removal."

The plaintiffs, a group of migrants granted parole and sponsors, sued administration officials claiming the government violated federal law governing the actions of agencies.

Talwani in April found that the law governing such parole did not allow for the program's blanket termination, instead requiring a case-by-case review. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put Talwani's decision on hold.

In Thursday's filing, the administration said the judge "lacked the authority to usurp the executive branch's control of foreign policy and immigration." The parole provision of federal immigration law gives government officials broad discretion to terminate such grants, it added.

In a lower court, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the government's move to "truncate parole en masse" misinterprets federal law and would cause irreparable harm if "hundreds of thousands of hardworking and law-abiding people across the country becoming undocumented and legally unemployable overnight."