Over 350,000 Venezuelans face deportation for a total of 880,000 immigrants | Credit: Sibrapid/Shutterstock
A US Supreme Court order will grant President Donald Trump’s administration the power to strip approximately 530,000 immigrants of legal protections, putting them at risk of deportation.
The ruling holds back previous court orders that maintained protections for humanitarian parolees for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The BBC reported that two of the three liberal judges in the court, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, opposed and removed the protection programme established by President Joe Biden for immigrants facing economic and political turmoil in the country of their origin. The decision comes after the court granted a temporary legal status from around 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in another case, according to the Associated Press (AP). I said.
The White House celebrated the ruling
The Trump administration recently filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court after a federal judge in Boston blocked an attempt to end the program. The Justice Department argues that protections during the Biden era are temporary and that the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke it without court intervention.
Shortly after today’s court order, the White House “celebrated” the opportunity to deport 500,000 “invaders,” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN. “The Supreme Court has justly stepped in.” Trump promised to expel millions of people when he campaigned last year.
Humanitarian parole programs have been used in the United States for decades to escape immigration and other turbulent circumstances, including Cubans in the 1960s after the revolution, from their own country’s wars and other turbulent circumstances.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Associated Press that Biden-era policies were not in line with immigration laws. “We are confident in the legality of our actions to protect Americans and look forward to further action from the Supreme Court to prove us.”
“How devastating is this?”
But Karen Tamlin, founder and director of the Judicial Action Center, said the decision has issued an “effectively green light” deportation order for half a million people to go out of the country.
“We can’t overstate how catastrophic this is,” she said. The court said, “We have allowed the Trump administration to unleash widespread confusion not only for clients and class members, but also for families, workplaces and communities.”
Immigration lawyers said the Trump administration’s decision was the first mass disruption of humanitarian parole. They said Trump’s action was “the largest mass illegal event in modern American history.”
