Supreme Court allows DHS to end parole for a half-million noncitizens

The Supreme Court on Friday morning cleared the way for the Trump administration to revoke the Biden administration’s grant of parole – that is, permission to stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – to more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In a brief unsigned order, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in Massachusetts that had temporarily barred the federal government from implementing the decision by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem while a challenge to it moves forward. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from Friday’s order, in an eight-page opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She wrote that her colleagues had “plainly botched” their ruling today, and she decried 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.” 

When noncitizens arrive in the United States, they must show that they are entitled to be here. If they cannot do so, they generally must either remain in the custody of immigration authorities or leave the country. But federal immigration law also gives the DHS secretary the power to give them parole, as well as the discretion to revoke that parole.

The dispute stems from Noem’s March 25 decision to terminate the parole of a large group of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, known as the CHNV special-parole programs. Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary during the Biden administration, had granted these immigrants parole (and then extended it) in the hope that doing so would deter illegal migration through the U.S. border with Mexico. Under the program, noncitizens who passed a background check and had a sponsor in the United States who agreed to provide support could receive prior permission to travel to the United States and request parole. 

Shortly after his second inauguration, however, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the DHS secretary to end all “categorical parole programs,” including the CHNV programs. Noem did so on March 25 in a notice in the Federal Register that explained that the programs “have at best traded an unmanageable population of unlawful migration along the southwest border for the additional complication of a substantial population of aliens in the interior of the United States without a clear path to a durable status.” 

A group of noncitizens who had been admitted to the United States under the CHNV programs filed a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts, seeking to challenge DHS’s March 2025 termination of the programs. 

In an order on April 14, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani barred DHS from terminating the CHNV programs without providing a case-by-case review of the decision to end parole for noncitizens who had benefited from the programs. And although she agreed with the federal government that courts cannot review the DHS secretary’s decision to revoke individual parole determinations, Talwani ruled that such a bar does not apply to this case because Noem did not have the authority to revoke an entire category’s worth of parole determinations. 

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit rejected DHS’s request to put Talwani’s order on hold, the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court that Talwani’s order had “nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions.” And it had created, he added, a “perverse one-way rachet” by finding fault only with Noem’s “decision to restore the traditional case-by-case process by undoing the prior categorical grant of CHNV parole.” Federal immigration law, he contended, “prescribes the exact opposite.” 

The noncitizens urged the justices to stay out of the dispute, telling the court that the federal government was seeking permission, through the court’s emergency docket, “to execute the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.” All of the noncitizens, they stressed, had “followed the law and were individually approved to enter the United States on a case-by-case basis”; categorically terminating the programs now would permanently harm them not only them but also their “employers and communities.” By contrast, they observed, the government has not pointed to any concrete harm from allowing Talwani’s order to remain in place – instead asserting only that her order “thwarts the Government’s policy goals and contravenes its interest in expeditiously removing CHNV parole beneficiaries.” But in any event, they added, the government can still remove any individual noncitizen whom it deems inadmissible; it simply needs to do so on a case-by-case basis. 

Two weeks after the briefing in the case was complete, and 11 days after the court allowed the Trump administration to end protected status for a different group of Venezuelan nationals, a majority of the court granted the Trump administration’s request. It put Talwani’s order on hold while the appeal moves forward in the 1st Circuit and, if necessary, in the Supreme Court. As is common for cases on the court’s emergency docket, the court did not provide an explanation for its decision. 

In her dissent, Jackson emphasized that the decision to pause a lower court’s order “does not reflect a back-of-the-napkin assessment of which party has the better legal argument.” Instead, she wrote, the determination rests on whether it is necessary to prevent permanent harm to either the parties or the public while the litigation moves forward. 

In this case, Jackson continued, the Trump administration has failed to show that it will be permanently injured if it cannot end the grant of parole now, rather than waiting until the dispute is resolved. This is particularly important, Jackson observed, when the court of appeals has agreed to fast-track its consideration of the Trump administration’s appeal. 

Meanwhile, according to Jackson , the noncitizens at the center of this dispute do face “significant problems” that “far exceed” any injury to the government. Many of them, she noted, “arrived here (at the invitation of the U.S. Government) because their home countries were afflicted by strife or they were otherwise subject to unsafe living or working conditions.” They “have sponsors here and, in many cases, have integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hope of eventually securing long-term legal status.” “No one disputes,” she concluded, “that social and economic chaos will ensue if that many noncitizen parolees are suddenly and summarily” removed from the country. 

Even if the Trump administration can ultimately end parole, Jackson explained, she would first allow the federal courts to resolve that “highly consequential legal issue.” “Instead,” she lamented, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to “do what it wants regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”