The Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump’s administration can begin taking steps to deport more than 500,000 immigrants who were granted emergency humanitarian protections to legally live and work in the United States.
A brief order from the nation’s highest court on Friday allows the administration to revoke temporary legal status granted to roughly 532,000 immigrants during Joe Biden’s administration.
The end of legal protections for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela follows the Supreme Court’s separate order ending those same protections for another 300,000 Venezuelans.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented to Friday’s order.
In her dissent, Justice Jackson warned that the court ignored the “devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
Last month, District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts temporarily blocked an order from Homeland Security Kristi Noem that would have ended legal status for more than 530,000 people admitted to the program.
The judge’s order maintained temporary legal status for roughly 110,300 Cubans, 210,000 Haitians, 93,100 Nicaraguans and another 117,300 Venezuelans.
Ending those protections would force targeted immigrants to “choose between two injurious options: continue following the law and leave the country on their own, or await removal proceedings” that put them “at risk of arrest and detention” and effectively kill any chances of “receiving other forms of immigration relief in the future — potentially permanently,” Judge Talwani wrote.
The cases before the Supreme Court are among more than a dozen based on emergency requests from the Trump administration for the court’s intervention, including in several case stemming from the president’s immigration agenda.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to cancel temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Venezuelans who fled President Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
Lawyers for the Trump administration said a Biden-era extension of those protections was not in the “national interest” and revoked them, a move that a federal judge said “smacks of racism” and threatened “irreparable harm” on hundreds of families.
This is a developing story
