SC allows Trump to revoke legal status for 500,000 migrants

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court on Friday gave the Trump administration the green light to revoke -- for now -- the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The decision puts some 532,000 people who came to the United States under a “parole” program launched by former president Joe Biden at risk of deportation. The parole programme allowed entry into the United States for two years for up to 30,000 migrants per month from the four countries, which have grim human rights records.

But as President Donald Trump takes a hard line on immigration, his administration has moved to overturn those protections in legal battles that reached all the way to the Supreme Court earlier this month. The government had asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court order barring them from ending the humanitarian protections.

The conservative-dominated court -- whose order was unsigned and provided no reasoning -- granted the administration a stay on that order, while legal battles continue. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackon and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, warning of the “devastating consequences” of upending the “lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending,” according to the document.

“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” they wrote. The migrants “now face two unbearable options. On the one hand, they could elect to leave the United States and, thereby, confront ´dangers in their native countries,´ experience destructive ´family separation,´” and possibly forfeit any chance of remedy based on their claims, they wrote.

“On the other, they could remain in the United States ... and risk imminent removal at the hands of Government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences.” Lower courts which barred the administration from revoking the migrants´ status had argued that it was acting on a flawed interpretation of immigration law.

Trump campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants. Among other measures, he invoked an obscure wartime law to fly hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.