A federal judge ruled Wednesday against the Trump administration’s attempts to curtail Biden-era “parole” programs that had offered tentative legal status to some illegal immigrants.
Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee to the court in Massachusetts, said the administration acted too rashly in suspending the parole for newcomers and “re-parole” for some already here.
She said Homeland Security never identified reasons why the Biden-era programs at issue were illegal, so the department lacked the power to shut them down without going through a more thorough process.
She said that made the decision “arbitrary and capricious,” which is key language for a judge to find that an executive action violates procedural law.
Judge Talwani also said any attempt to stop processing of other benefits, such as work permits, for those already paroled would be illegal.
And she said attempts to pause processing of people who wish to sign up as financial sponsors of parolees were also done in too shoddy a fashion. She said the department needed to offer more of a justification than the rampant fraud it cited.
“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,” the judge ruled.
She issued an injunction putting the various pauses on hold.
One of the programs at issue is the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuelan parole, which granted tentative status to more than 500,000 unauthorized migrants.
Another is what’s known as Military Parole in Place.
The Biden administration created that to allow illegal immigrants who are close relatives of U.S. troops to remain in the U.S. despite their status.
