A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from ending a Biden-era program that provided legal status to hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said that the Trump administration could not end former President Joe Biden’s CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) immigration parole program without granting a case-by-case review to its more than 500,000 recipients. In her decision, Talwani sided with a number of CHNV recipients who had sued the Trump administration over the decision to end the program early on April 24.
“The immediate impact of the shortening of their grant of parole is to cause their lawful status in the United States to lapse early — in less than two weeks. If their parole status is allowed to lapse, Plaintiffs will be faced with two unfavorable options: continue following the law and leave the country on their own, or await removal proceedings,” Talwani, an Obama appointee, wrote in a 41-page ruling.
Talwani said that the Trump administration hadn’t considered humanitarian reasons when it moved to end the program.
Biden began the program first for Venezuelans in 2022 before expanding it to include the other three countries in 2023. Each month, this allowed tens of thousands of people from each country to obtain legal protections in the United States, known as immigration parole. The Biden administration billed the program as a way to decrease illegal immigration from the CHNV countries by creating “legal pathways” for those immigrants to use instead of trying to unlawfully cross the southern border.
Each recipient was supposed to be vetted for national security purposes and had to prove they had a financial sponsor already in the United States. The Trump administration has argued that the Biden administration poorly vetted those it allowed into the country. Some data from the program showed evidence of fraud, as one review found that 3,218 people applied to sponsor around 101,000 migrants.
President Donald Trump directed the program to be shut down, and the Department of Homeland Security published a notice in the Federal Register on March 25 revealing its decision to terminate the program by April 24.
“These programs do not serve a significant public benefit, are not necessary to reduce levels of illegal immigration, did not sufficiently mitigate the domestic effects of illegal immigration, are not serving their intended purposes, and are inconsistent with the Administration’s foreign policy goals,” DHS said in its notice.
The department added that it planned to remove individuals from the program after the April 24 expiration and encouraged recipients to voluntarily leave the country before that deadline.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called the ruling an example of “judicial tyranny.”
“Marxist judge orders federal government to provide amnesty to half a million illegal aliens that Biden criminally flew into American towns,” he posted on X. “This is a legal insurrection against democracy itself.”
