By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) – A federal judge said on Friday she will block U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from cutting short temporary legal status for 10,000 to 12,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that allowed them to reunite with family members in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said during a hearing in Boston she plans to issue on Monday a temporary restraining order sought by immigrant rights groups who challenged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s decision last month to terminate all family reunification parole programs for citizens from the seven nations.
The migrants are among a group of up to 15,000 who entered the United States through the family reunification programs. They would have been forced as of Wednesday to return to the countries they came from or face deportation as a result of the department’s action.
JUDGE CITES INSUFFICIENT NOTICE
Talwani, who was appointed by Democratic former President Barack Obama, expressed “frustration” with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to strip them of lawful status, saying the department had not, as of the hearing, shown it had given them proper notice it was doing so.
“I have a group of people here who are trying to follow the law, and I’m saying to you that we, America, also need to follow the law,” Talwani told a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Katie Rose Talley, the government’s lawyer, countered that Noem had broad discretion to terminate the migrants’ grants of parole. “There’s nothing unlawful about that,” she said.
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move, part of Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda, followed actions to cancel hundreds of thousands of humanitarian parole grants that allowed foreign nationals to temporarily live and work in the United States.
The Homeland Security Department announced on December 12 it was ending family reunification parole programs that Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration created or modernized in 2022 and 2023, effective January 14.
Under those processes, U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, also known as “green card” holders, could apply to serve as sponsors for family members in those seven countries, allowing them to live in the United States while they awaited approval for immigrant visas.
Eligible migrants entered the United States through those programs from November 2023 to January 2025, the month Trump took office. Those migrants received three-year initial grants of humanitarian parole.
Homeland Security said the programs had been abused to allow “poorly vetted aliens to circumvent the traditional parole process” and could be exploited to allow “malicious and fraudulent actors” to enter the country. It said terminating the parole grants and migrants’ work authorities would allow for “a return to America First.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Bill Berkrot, Rod Nickel)
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