Supreme Court Allows Trump to End Temporary Protections for Some Migrants

The unsigned order Friday halts, for now, a lower court injunction that stopped the government from removing those protections under a parole program while the case proceeds. 

The Biden administration granted temporary parole to large groups of immigrants from the four countries who met certain criteria, allowing them to seek work authorization and other legal protections for two-year terms. In March, the Department of Homeland Security canceled the mass parole approval, as the Trump administration ramped up its efforts to crack down on mass immigration. 

An estimated 532,000 noncitizens from those four countries are affected, according to court filings. 

 Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, two members of the court’s liberal wing, publicly dissented from the court’s decision. Jackson wrote that the consequences of allowing the administration to move forward and revoke the parole program’s protections would be sharply disruptive to the people affected. She said such disruption argued in favor of maintaining the status quo until the underlying legal issue was fully resolved. 

“Instead, the Court allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process,” she wrote. 

A federal court in Massachusetts in April granted an injunction to block the administration’s cancellation of the temporary parole, saying it could be revoked on a case-by-case basis but not en masse. A federal appeals court left the halt in place, and the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene. 

In the administration’s brief to the high court, Solicitor General John Sauer urged the justices to set aside the order, saying it “blocks the Executive Branch from exercising its discretionary authority over a key aspect of the Nation’s immigration and foreign policy and thwarts Congress’s express vesting of that decision in the Secretary, not courts.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs bringing the challenge urged the Supreme Court to leave the injunction in place. There was nothing stopping the administration from reviewing parole grantees on a case-by-case basis, they argued in their brief. “A stay of the district court’s order would upend the lives of Plaintiffs and the hundreds of thousands of class members and cause widespread social and economic disruption to employers and communities across the country in one fell swoop,” they added. 

It is the second time in recent weeks the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to end temporary immigration protections while those moves are being challenged in court. Earlier this month the high court allowed the administration to proceed with ending separate temporary protections for a group of Venezuelans living in the U.S. 

“We are confident in the legality of our actions to protect the American people and look forward to further action from the Supreme Court to vindicate us,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. 

The Trump administration has had a mixed record defending its immigration and deportation policies in lower courts. It is seeking the Supreme Court’s intervention in another case, as it attempts to lift an order that stopped it from deporting people to countries they are not from. 

Write to Mariah Timms at mariah.timms@wsj.com