Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States and stranded in Honduras disembark from a Conviasa Airlines plane upon arrival at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Maiquetia, Venezuela on March 24, 2025.
Juan Barreto | Afp | Getty Images
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Donald Trump can terminate the protected status of around 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela while an appeal of the president’s order is still pending.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a scathing dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority of the Supreme Court “has plainly botched” its assessment in granting the Trump administration a stay of a lower court order that had blocked the termination.
“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 wrote in the dissent.
“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 anticipated victory,” she wrote. “The balance of the equities also weighs heavily in respondents’ favor.”
“While it is apparent that the Government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage, court-ordered stays exist to minimize — not maximize — harm to litigating parties.”
Trump, on his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to terminate all so-called “categorical parole programs,” which had granted those immigrants protections from deportation from the United States and, in some case,s to legally work in the U.S.
A group of plaintiffs challenged the DHS’s revocation of the programs in federal court in Massachusetts, where a judge stayed the department’s action.
The 1st Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The Trump administration then asked the Supreme Court to undo to the lower courts’ decisions.
Friday’s ruling by the Supreme Court means DHS can revoke the group’s protected status while the 1st Circuit considers an appeal of the order itself.
