The Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to revoke temporary residency for 532,000 migrants

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this Friday in favor of the Donald Trump government being able to withdraw the temporary legal protection granted by the previous Joe Biden Administration to 532,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti.

The highest US court has granted the emergency request filed by the Department of Homeland Security with a vote of seven justices in favor and two against: the liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Trump administration was trying to challenge a ruling by a federal judge – which remains in effect for now – from the state of Massachusetts that considered that the Government could not annul this “humanitarian parole”, which allowed these 532,000 people to live and work provisionally in USA, without analyzing the procedure on a case-by-case basis.

In the dissenting opinion, Brown Jackson considers that “the court has literally botched its ruling today.”

“(The court) demands practically nothing from the Government regarding irreparable damages. And it underestimates the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to hastily disrupt the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million foreigners while their legal claims are still pending,” writes the judge.

Brown Jackson emphasizes that the more than half a million migrants now face “two unsustainable options.” On the one hand, they can choose to leave the U.S. and face “dangers in their countries of origin,” as the judge of Massachusetts already warned, or they can remain in the country after their “parole” expires “and risk imminent expulsion at the hands of Government agents, with the serious consequences that this entails.”

Today’s is the second Supreme Court ruling this year in this area, after it authorized Trump 10 days ago to withdraw the temporary protection status (TPS) to some 350,000 Venezuelan migrants.

The Republican returned to the White House with the promise to greatly toughen the country’s immigration policy, which, according to him, includes the expulsion of millions of immigrants.

The so-called “humanitarian parole” was expanded in January 2023 by former President Biden (2021-2025) to facilitate the legal immigration of citizens from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti, among the nationalities with the largest representation at the time in irregular arrivals at the southern border with Mexico.