Supreme Court Lets Trump Revoke ‘Parole’ Status For 500,000 Migrants
The U.S. Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to remove the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, supporting the Republican president’s push to increase deportations.
The court stayed the order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that halted the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 of these migrants by former President Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to immediate removal while the case is heard in lower courts.
The ruling was unsigned and did not justify, as is common with emergency court orders. Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, officially dissented.
Immigration parole is a type of temporary authorization granted by American law to enter the nation for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” which allows grantees to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s strategy for deterring illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20, his first day back in office, calling for the elimination of humanitarian parole programs. The Department of Homeland Security then attempted to terminate them in March, shortening the two-year parole awards. The government said that revoking parole would make it simpler to place migrants in an “expedited removal” procedure.
The lawsuit is one of many that the Trump administration has filed urgently with the nation’s highest court, seeking to overturn judgments by lower courts that hinder his sweeping plans, including those targeting immigration.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let it go ahead with ending legal protections for migrants from Syria. This was the latest emergency appeal to the highest court in the country.
The Department of Justice wants the court to overturn a New York judge’s decision that stopped the Department of Homeland Security from ending temporary protected status for Syrians while lawsuits are going on.
The government is also asking for a wider ruling that could affect other cases about protecting people from other countries as the administration tries to crack down on immigration.
According to court records, about 6,100 people from Syria have temporary legal status after leaving their homes because of armed conflict.
The International Refugee Assistance Project says that ending those protections could stop people from being able to work legally in the United States and put more people at risk of deportation, especially the 800 people who have applications pending.
The first protections for Syrians came in 2012, during a civil war that lasted more than ten years and ended with the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acted to revoke protected status less than a year later, finding that the situation “no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals.”
Immigration lawyers disagreed with that choice, saying that Syria was still dealing with a humanitarian crisis and that quickly taking away legal protections would force Syrians in the US to make “impossible choices.”
The administration says that the department can give or take away the temporary protections and that judges shouldn’t get involved.
The government must respond to the appeal by March 4.
DHS has taken steps to take away legal protections that let immigrants from many countries stay in the US and work legally.
That includes more than a million people from Venezuela and Haiti all together.
A different judge in Washington recently stopped the government from taking away protections for 350,000 Haitians.
The administration has won a number of cases on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, which lets it move forward with important parts of Trump’s agenda.
Top DHS Special Agent And His Wife Found Dead
A Department of Homeland Security special agent and his wife were found dead in their New Jersey home in what appears to be a murder-suicide, prosecutors said.
Police in Sayreville responded to the couple’s home on Glynn Court around 8 p.m. July 3 and found Kelly Latauro, 46, dead inside the residence, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said.
Her husband, 52-year-old Christopher Latauro, was discovered dead in the backyard.
Both appear to have been shot.
Authorities said Christopher is believed to be the shooter and the case is being investigated as a murder-suicide.
Police told residents to keep away from Glynn Court, from Deerfield Road to Scarlet Drive, briefly because of police activity.
The area was reopened about 40 minutes later, but police remained on scene.
According to NJ101.5, citing DHS records from 2019 and 2020, Christopher was a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security.
Authorities have not said what may have sparked the violence.
Kelly’s sister-in-law Robyn Perlman-Spencer confirmed her death in a Facebook post on July 7, remembering her in a heartbreaking tribute.
“As many of you may now know, my beautiful sister in law Kelly Iatauro was senselessly and suddenly taken from us on Friday. Kelly was a bright light- kind, thoughtful, hysterical, inappropriate, and just one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. She left a lasting impression on anyone that was lucky enough to know her,” Robyn wrote in part.
Sayreville police confirmed officers responded to the Glynn Court residence on July 3 and found both people dead of gunshot wounds.
The incident is being treated as a murder-suicide, and Christopher is suspected to be the shooter, the spokesperson said.
The Department of Homeland Security and Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office did not immediately respond to additional requests for comment on the case.
What began as a heavy police response to a deadly scene left two people dead and the quiet Middlesex County neighborhood stunned.
Investigators are still trying to piece together what happened inside the home leading up to the gunfire.
Separately, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made headlines last week with an election-related announcement.
Mullin on Friday said officials who don’t cooperate with the administration’s election security efforts may be slapped with fines — and potentially prison time.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections — and they chose not to — then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said during a press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mullin also promised DHS would work to “speed up our security enhancements” for states.
He vowed to hold up federal election security grants until state officials took steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls.
Mullin made his comments after President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election security Thursday night, when he repeated already known concerns about the security of voting systems, alleged Chinese efforts to get into voter rolls, and aired old gripes about the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
In his remarks on Friday, the DHS secretary focused on DHS’s work with states to secure election systems and scrub voter registration rolls for fraud and concerns about noncitizen voting.
The Justice Department also sent letters this month threatening prosecution to election officials across the country if they don’t remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.
On Friday, Mullin seemed to suggest that the agency was able to estimate the numbers using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and said 23 states are already working with DHS to analyze voter rolls.
And he criticized the legal challenges that are hindering the administration’s efforts: Last month, a judge blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of information about Americans, including Social Security numbers and citizenship status.
