Judge rules Trump administration unlawfully terminated legal status of migrants who used Biden-era app

A federal judge in Massachusetts unwound the Trump administration’s termination of parole status for some 900,000 migrants who were given permission to temporarily live in the United States.

The Biden administration launched the CBP One app to address high flows at the border, allowing migrants to make an appointment to seek asylum, while others were “paroled” into the country for up to two years.

U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, found that the Trump administration violated the law last April when it emailed the group en masse telling them, “It is time for you to leave the United States.”

“The regulations do not give the agency unfettered discretion to terminate parole,” Burroughs wrote.

“When Defendants terminated the impacted noncitizens’ parole without observing the process mandated by statute and by their own regulations, they took action that was ‘not in accordance with law.’”

The Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said the ruling “brings long-awaited relief after months of fear and uncertainty.”

Democracy Forward, which helped litigate the case, also celebrated the ruling.

“Today’s ruling is a clear rejection of an administration that has tried to erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button,” Skye Perryman, the group’s president, said in a ruling. 

“Our clients followed the law: they waited, registered, were inspected, and were granted parole under the law. The Trump-Vance administration’s effort to tear that status away overnight was unlawful and cruel — and today, the court rejected that harmful and destabilizing policy.”

The Trump administration had argued that former President Biden abused parole authority by broadly awarding the status, rather than awarding it on a case-by-case basis.

President Trump shut down the app during his first month in office.

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