US judge to block Trump from revoking thousands of migrants’ legal status

BOSTON - A federal judge said she will block US President Donald Trump’s administration on April 10 from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States.

US District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston said the US Department of Homeland Security’s decision to cut short a two-year parole granted to migrants under Mr Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden was based on an incorrect reading of the law.

The administration’s action, announced in a Federal Register notice published in March, marked an expansion of the Republican President’s hardline crackdown on immigration.

The judge, an appointee of Democratic then President Barack Obama, said the administration wanted to expose about 450,000 people to expedited deportation, effective from April 24, based on a wrong interpretation of the statute governing the process.

She said that law focused not on individuals who were granted permission to enter the US under a grant of parole, but on people who illegally crossed the border and on providing a means to remove them on an expedited basis.

“What you’re prioritising is not people coming over the border, but the people who followed the rules,” Judge Talwani said.

Ms Laura Flores-Perilla, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with immigrant rights group Justice Action Centre, said she hoped the judge would move quickly to finalise her decision halting an unprecedented mass termination of migrants’ parole status.

She said the Biden-era humanitarian parole programmes had been essential in allowing people fleeing danger or persecution in their home countries to establish a life for themselves and for their families in the US.

“The stakes are quite high,” Ms Flores-Perilla told reporters outside the courthouse. “These are human lives at stake, and the urgency is very much there.”

Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the Department of Justice immediately responded to a request for comment.

Immigrant rights advocates had sued to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to pause various Biden-era parole programmes that have allowed Ukrainian, Afghan, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants to enter the country.

But while the case was pending, the administration moved to end the two-year parole granted to Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants, meaning they would no longer have lawful status in the US.

Mr Biden launched a parole entry programme for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those countries.

Mr Brian Ward, a lawyer with the Justice Department, said during the April 10 hearing that the parole programmes had always been discretionary, and that there was nothing requiring US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to revoke parole on an individual, case-by-case basis.

Judge Talwani indicated she would not require the programmes to continue to accept new applicants, as “it is not my job to get into the larger policy question”.

But she said she found the administration’s rationale for revoking the status of people already in the country lawfully confusing, and added that she would work to get an order out urgently to pause the Federal Register notice. REUTERS