Supreme Court Allows Trump Admin to Remove Parole Status of Immigrants From 4 Countries

The court let the administration lift humanitarian parole status for 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 17, 2024. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File

The Supreme Court has temporarily stayed a lower court decision that halted the Trump administration’s attempt to remove a protection known as parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The court’s decision, which came on May 30, blocks the lower court order as the issue plays out in the court system. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the court’s decision.

The Trump administration had argued that the decision to remove parole was discretionary for the secretary of homeland security and not reviewable by courts.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court that a district court in Massachusetts “engaged in the very review Congress prohibited—needlessly upending critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core Executive Branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer presented the request to stay the district court’s ruling as an attempt to “correct a recent, destabilizing trend in immigration cases,” according to the filing.

The Supreme Court’s May 30 ruling followed another decision this month in which the justices allowed the president to remove the protected status for Venezuelans. That case similarly said a district court had ignored a bar on judicial review of Homeland Security decisions.

Foreign nationals urged the Supreme Court not to accept the administration’s request. The district court block, they said, protected half a million individuals from potential deportation.

“Had the district court not granted preliminary relief, the Plaintiff class of approximately half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans lawfully in this country would have become undocumented, legally unemployable, and subject to mass expulsion on an expedited basis at midnight on April 24, 2025,” they told the court.

Parole, which can be issued under federal law for humanitarian reasons, was granted by the Biden administration for broad categories of people.

Jackson, who also dissented from the decision on Venezuelans’ protected status, said in her dissent on May 30 that even if the administration was likely to prevail in its legal arguments, weighing the harms led her to side with the foreign nationals at this stage of litigation.

“The bottom line is this: Our decision to issue a stay (or not) involves more—much more—than merely forecasting the eventual victor. ... What stays are about, at their core, is an equitable assessment of who will be harmed, and to what extent, during the litigation process, with the ultimate goal of reducing the real-world consequences of the unavoidable, pending-case-related delay,” she said.

Trump has also asked the Supreme Court to intervene in a case about the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to remove illegal immigrants to South Sudan and other countries. As in the parole case, the Trump administration has said that a lower court intruded on executive authority by blocking its policy. That request is pending.

At the time, Attorney General Pam Bondi said “the invasion of illegal aliens must end, and the conduct of our nation’s foreign policy cannot be directed by a single federal court judge.”

The president encountered some resistance from the Supreme Court when it temporarily blocked his deportations of suspected Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act. In those cases, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from multiple court decisions on the issue.