By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from halting legal entry “parole” programs that have allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants with U.S. sponsors to enter the country legally.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston issued an order requiring agencies under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to resume the processing of applications from migrants covered by those parole programs pending the outcome of a class action lawsuit.
Talwani rejected the Trump administration’s claim that ending the programs was within the agencies’ broad discretion to direct immigration policy.
Federal law still requires agencies to follow a lengthy process for granting or denying parole and other immigration relief, wrote Talwani, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama.
Talwani in April had blocked the Trump administration from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States. The administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause that decision pending an appeal.
The Department of Homeland Security and lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The decision came in a lawsuit challenging a pause on the processing of applications from Ukrainian, Afghan, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants either seeking to be granted entry through the parole process or who have already been granted that status and are seeking to stay.
Talwani’s decision focused on policies the U.S. Department of Homeland Security adopted after Trump on his first day back in office on January 20 signed an executive order directing it to end the Biden-era parole program.
In a memo that day, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman directed agencies under his purview to pause, modify or terminate any categorical parole programs, which he asserted were not authorized by law as parole could only be granted on a case-by-case basis.
DHS officials subsequently stopped processing new parole applications and in mid-February barred staff from considering requests from migrants from Ukraine and Latin America who had already been granted parole to pursue other forms of immigration status, such as asylum or temporary protected status.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Chris Reese)
