A federal judge in Massachusetts on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to lift a pause it imposed on various immigration applications, saying it was not in the public interest for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to lose their legal status in the U.S.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani is a reprieve for many immigrants from Afghanistan, Latin America, Ukraine and other parts of the world whose ability to remain and work in the U.S. lawfully had been threatened by several Trump administration actions.
Agreeing with pro-immigrant advocates who sued the Trump administration, Talwani found that the government’s actions were arbitrary and capricious, in violation of federal administrative law.
“This court emphasizes, as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families,” Talwani wrote in her order.
The programs at the center of Talwani’s order rely on a legal immigration authority known as parole, which allows the federal government to temporarily admit foreigners on humanitarian or public interest grounds. President Trump’s appointees have sought to curtail the use of parole, arguing that the authority was broadly abused by the Biden administration.
Talwani directed the Trump administration to end a pause it quietly enacted in February to suspend the processing of immigration benefit applications filed by immigrants allowed into the U.S. under several Biden administration programs that relied on the parole authority.
That pause mainly affected 240,000 Ukrainians allowed into the U.S. under a sponsorship program known as Uniting for Ukraine set up after the Russian invasion of their homeland in February 2022, as well as 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who benefited from another Biden-era parole policy. It prevented those who entered the U.S. under those policies from obtaining other forms of legal status, like asylum, Temporary Protected Status or permanent residency.
Talwani ordered the government to lift another pause, issued in January that has barred immigration officials from considering parole extension requests from Afghans, Ukrainians and other immigrant populations granted entry into the U.S. through parole programs, mostly under the Biden administration.
Her ruling also blocked the Trump administration from taking any actions to stop processing parole applications under a longstanding program designed to give temporary legal relief to the immigrant relatives of U.S. service members or veterans. The administration has said this program has not been affected by its efforts to restrict the use of parole.
Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which oversees the parole programs, did not immediately comment on Wednesday’s court order.
The ruling by Talwani is the second time she ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back parole programs.
In April, Talwani blocked the administration from moving forward with a plan to terminate the legal status and seek the deportation of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who came to the U.S. under the parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The Trump administration justified the move by saying the parole initiative was plagued by fraud and inadequate vetting procedures.
The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to suspend Talwani’s ruling from April, saying federal courts are unjustifiably interfering with Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
“The court’s order blocks the Executive Branch from exercising its discretionary authority over a key aspect of the Nation’s immigration and foreign policy and thwarts Congress’s express vesting of that decision in the Secretary, not courts,” the Justice Department wrote in a May 8 request to the Supreme Court.
