The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end a Biden-era mass parole program for thousands of migrants, pausing on Friday a lower court’s ruling that had prevented President Donald Trump from doing so.
The high court granted a stay of U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s April order, which had blocked the revocation of work permits and legal status for over 530,000 migrants flown into the United States under a Biden administration program.
The unsigned order from the Supreme Court said the April 14 order was paused until a final ruling on the case is made in an appeals court or the Supreme Court — if the justices decide to hear the merits of the case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent to the order, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Jackson said in her dissent that her colleagues “plainly botched this assessment today” by granting the pause. She argued that the “irreparable harm” caused to the migrants challenging the Trump administration’s order is significantly worse than the harm that would be caused by temporarily preventing the government from revoking their temporary status.
“It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm. And it undervalues 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,” Jackson said.
“Even if the Government is likely to win on the merits, in our legal system, success takes time and the stay standards require more than an anticipated victory,” she added. “I would have denied the Government’s application because its harm-related showing is patently insufficient.”
The Trump administration petitioned the high court to block the order preventing it from ending the protected status, which former President Joe Biden afforded them during his term. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued in his emergency application to the high court that not allowing the program to be ended would lead to time-consuming individual removal proceedings for each of the migrants.
“When lower courts have disregarded Congress’s commands in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and usurped the Executive Branch’s control over immigration policy, this Court has not hesitated to intervene,” Sauer said in the emergency application earlier this month.
The coalition of groups suing to keep the program in place has contended that the mass parole offered humanitarian relief, while the Trump administration has viewed it as a mechanism Biden used to bring in scores of migrants by executive fiat.
Talwani’s April order in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that the Trump administration unlawfully acted when it planned to revoke legal status en masse and not give each migrant individual review. She said migrants faced “two unfavorable options: continue following the law and leave the country on their own, or await removal proceedings.”
TRUMP TARIFFS APPEAR DESTINED FOR SUPREME COURT SHOWDOWN
Earlier this week, Talwani, who was appointed to the court by former President Barack Obama, ordered the Trump administration to resume processing applications for migrants seeking to renew their work permits and status.
The high court’s Friday order was the latest intervention in pausing lower court rulings that have blocked the Trump administration’s actions on a variety of matters, including immigration and reshaping the federal government. The significant number of applications hoping to pause these orders has dominated the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.
