BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge said Friday she expects to temporarily block the Trump administration’s efforts to end a program that provides temporary legal protection to more than 10,000 family members of citizens and green card holders.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said at the hearing that she plans to issue a temporary restraining order but did not say when it would be issued. The case is part of a broader effort by the administration to end temporary legal protections for several groups and comes just a week after a judge ruled that hundreds of people from South Sudan can legally live and work in the United States.
“The government, after inviting people to apply, is now casting a net among those people and getting green cards,” said Justin Cox, who works at the Justice Action Center and argued the plaintiffs’ case. “That’s incredibly disproportionate.”
The case involves a program called Family Reunification Parole, or FRP, and affects people from Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras. Many of them are set to lose their legal protections, which were in place during the Biden administration, until January 14. The Department of Homeland Security ended the safeguards late last year.
The lawsuit involves five plaintiffs, but lawyers are seeking to cover any rulings for everyone who was part of the program.
“Although in temporary status, these parolees did not come temporarily; they came to get a jump-start on their new lives in the United States, usually bringing close family members with them,” the plaintiffs wrote in their motion. “Since their arrival, FRP parolees have obtained employment verification documents, jobs, and enrolled their children in school.”
The government argued in its brief and in court that Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem had the authority to terminate any parole program and provided sufficient notice by publishing the termination in the Federal Register. He has also argued that it is necessary to stop the program on the basis of national security as people’s assets are not checked. It also said the program would be better used in other immigration programs to sustain it.
“Parole can be revoked at any time,” state attorney Katie Rose Talley told the court. “It’s happening. There’s nothing illegal about it.”
Talwani said that the government can end the program and raised questions about the way of conducting the program.
The government has argued that declaring the program’s termination in the Federal Registry is sufficient. But Talwani demanded that the government show how it alerted people through written notice – letters or emails – that the program was ending.
“I understand why the plaintiffs come here and plan all this and think they’re going to be here for a very long time,” Talwani said. “I have a group of people who try to follow the law. I’m telling you, we as Americans, the United States needs to.”
Lower courts have largely supported temporary protections for many groups. But in May, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to remove temporary legal protections from millions of immigrants for the time being, pushing the total number of people who could face deportation to nearly 1 million.
The justices overturned a lower court order that upheld humanitarian parole protections for more than 500,000 immigrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The decision comes after the court allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in another case.
The court did not explain its reasoning in the summary order, as is common in its emergency dockets. The two judges publicly disagreed.
