US President Donald Trump’s bid to end temporary legal status for thousands of migrants was faced with rejection from a federal appeals court, giving a blow to his ongoing immigration crackdown aimed at increasing deportations.
This appeal was as a part of his latest efforts to curb legal status and deport migrants including Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, even those previously protected under existing programmes.
The Boston-based 1st US circuit court of appeals on Monday declined to suspend a previous ruling that had blocked the department of homeland security (DHS) from ending a two-year humanitarian parole granted under former President Joe Biden. That order had prevented DHS from abruptly revoking the migrants’ right to remain and work in the United States.
Trump officials argued that homeland security secretary Kristi Noem had the authority to cancel the parole en masse, and claimed that the court’s block was effectively forcing the government to “retain hundreds of thousands of aliens in the country against its will,” Reuters reported.
However, the three-judge panel, all appointed by Democratic presidents, dismissed that claim, arguing that Noem “has not at this point made a ‘strong showing’ that her categorical termination of plaintiffs’ parole is likely to be sustained on appeal.”
Karen Tumlin, a lawyer with the justice action center which brought the legal challenge, praised the court’s decision calling that the administration’s actions “reckless and illegal.”
The dispute arose from a lawsuit by immigrant rights advocates over the Biden-era parole programmes, which had allowed migrants from countries including Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Latin America to enter the US on humanitarian grounds.
While that legal battle continued, the homeland security department announced in a Federal Register on 25 March that it would end the two-year parole status for around 400,000 people, prompting swift legal action.
US district judge Indira Talwani, who had initially halted the policy, ruled on 25 April that the department had wrongly applied the law by attempting to cancel parole status categorically rather than reviewing cases individually. She said the decision was based on a legal error and misinterpreted the agency’s ability to deport individuals through proper legal channels.
The US department of homeland security is yet to comment on the ruling.
