Trump receives Supreme Court approval to expel 530,000 people with temporary residence permits

BarcelonaThe U.S. Supreme Court on Friday authorized the Trump administration to suspend a temporary permit program launched during the Biden era that allowed 532,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to live and work temporarily in the United States. This is the second time this month that the high court has sided with Trump's attempts to revoke temporary legal protections for immigrants. The Supreme Court previously opened the door to ending another program that granted work permits to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day in the White House seeking to unilaterally end the program. Federal law allowed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to grant or revoke these permits. The legal question is whether the department could revoke the status of all beneficiaries at once or must conduct a case-by-case review.

In 2023, the Biden administration announced a program to grant these permits to qualified migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who underwent official review rather than attempting to enter the country irregularly. Applicants were required to have a sponsor in the United States and pass a security screening process. Despite disagreements between the two sides, it appears that the Biden administration did conduct some form of individual review before granting the permits.

Migrant lawsuit

Trump argued before the Supreme Court that the decision to end the program was one of the most important in immigration policy. The lower court orders temporarily blocking the measure, he said, disrupted "critical immigration policies designed to deter illegal entry, weakened essential executive prerogatives, and reversed democratically approved policies that significantly influenced the November election."

After a group of immigrants who benefited from the program sued, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani temporarily blocked the administration's attempt to end the program across the board. She concluded that the government could continue to revoke individual permits, but only after a case-by-case review. Talwani was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013.

A federal appeals court in Boston refused to overturn Talwani's temporary order on May 5. Another three-judge panel—two appointed by Joe Biden and one by Barack Obama—was skeptical that Kristi Noem had the authority to end the program outright.

The Supreme Court order authorizing the suspension of the program was unsigned. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson voted against it. While the court's urgency ruling is not final—the underlying legal case will continue in lower courts—the order allows the administration to expedite deportations of migrants who have thus far benefited from the program.

Since the 1950s, federal immigration law has allowed the administration to "authorize humanitarian entry" for certain migrants arriving at the border. For example, during the Eisenhower administration, tens of thousands of people fleeing Soviet repression in Hungary after World War II were authorized to enter. Migrants who obtained this permit could live and work legally in the country, usually for two years, although their status was temporary.