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A federal judge said Friday she expected to temporarily block the FBI’s efforts trump card The government ended a program that provided temporary legal protection to more than 10,000 citizen family members and green card holders.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said during the hearing that she planned to issue a temporary restraining order, but did not say when. The case, part of a broader government effort to end temporary legal protections for numerous groups, comes just over a week after another judge ruled that hundreds of South Sudanese can legally live and work in the United States.
“After inviting people to apply, the government is now setting a trap between those people to get green cards,” said Justin Cox, an attorney with the Justice Action Center who defended the plaintiffs. “It’s extremely unfair.”
The case involves a program called “Family Reunion” speechor FRP, and affects people from Colombia, cubaEcuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras. As of January 14, most of them will lose legal protections put in place during the Biden administration. The Department of Homeland Security ended the protection late last year.
The case involves five plaintiffs, but attorneys are seeking to have any ruling cover everyone in the scheme.
“While in temporary status, these parolees are not temporarily in the United States; they are coming to the United States to start a new life, often bringing immediate family members with them,” the plaintiffs wrote in the motion. “Since their arrival, FRP parolees have obtained employment authorization documents, worked, and enrolled their children in school.”
The government argued in its brief and in court that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem The authority to terminate any parole program and provide adequate notice by publishing the termination information in the federal registry. It also argued that ending the scheme was necessary for national security reasons because people were not subject to property checks. It also said resources to maintain the program would be better spent on other immigration programs.
“Parole can be terminated at any time,” government attorney Katie Rose Talley told the court. “That’s what’s being done. It’s not illegal.”
Talwani acknowledged that the government could end the program, but she questioned how it would be implemented.
The government argued that simply announcing the termination of the program in the federal registry would be enough. But Talwani asked the government to show how people can be alerted through written notifications (letters or emails) that the scheme is coming to an end.
“I understand why the plaintiffs feel like they came here and made all these plans and are going to be here for a long time,” Talwani said. “I have a group of people who are trying to comply with the law. I say to you, we as Americans, America needs to do this.”
Lower courts have largely upheld the preservation of temporary protections for many groups. But in May, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to temporarily lift temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, bringing the total number of people newly at risk of deportation to nearly 1 million.
The justices vacated a lower court order that preserved humanitarian parole protections for more than 500,000 immigrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The decision came after a court allowed the government to revoke the temporary legal status of some 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in a separate case.
The court did not explain its reasoning in a brief order, as is typical in emergency cases. Two judges publicly dissented.
