Supreme Court OKs Trump rollbacks of Biden immigration policies, less certain on deportations

The Supreme Court has taken a mixed approach to President Trump on immigration, expressing skepticism over his rush to complete deportations but blessing his attempts to roll back the Biden-era policies that fueled the migrant surge in the first place.

The latest example came Friday, when the high court gave Mr. Trump the green light to shut down a Biden “parole” program that has welcomed more than 500,000 migrants who otherwise lacked legal visas to get into the U.S.

In a brief unsigned order, the justices put on hold a lower court ruling that had blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from revoking that parole.

That means roughly half a million migrants can now be kicked out of their “parole,” erasing their tentative legal status and making them eligible for deportation.

The ruling follows one from a week prior in which the justices allowed the Trump administration to revoke a “temporary protected status” grant to some 350,000 Venezuelans, undoing yet another Biden leniency.

At the same time, though, the justices have also issued several rulings ordering Mr. Trump to deliver more “due process” to specific migrants he is trying to deport.

“It kind of feels like they’re doing well on the easy ones and not so well on the harder ones,” Rosemary Jenks, a lawyer who serves as policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project, said of the justices’ handling of immigration cases so far in the second Trump administration.

Immigrant rights advocates were incensed at the latest ruling.

“The Supreme Court has effectively greenlit deportation orders for an estimated half a million people, the largest such de-legalization in the modern era,” said Karen Tumlin, founder of the Justice Action Center, which led the legal challenge in the parole case.

Those people are Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who former President Joseph R. Biden allowed into the country despite having no legal visa to be admitted.

The Biden administration justified the program by saying those migrants had been coming across the southern border and were overwhelming the Border Patrol. Letting them come through airports took pressure off the border.

It turned out to be rife with fraud, and as Mr. Trump has proved in just a few short months it wasn’t necessary to solve the border. After the change in administration, Ms. Noem revoked it.

But a lower court ruled her move illegal. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee to the court in Massachusetts, said parole has to be granted on a case-by-case basis under the law, so revoking it must be done on a case-by-case basis.

The justices didn’t explain why they blocked Judge Talwani’s ruling.

What explanations there are have come from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who led a dissent in the parole case and said her colleagues “botched” the ruling, putting Mr. Trump’s desire for expeditious action ahead of the lives of the migrants.

She said the court’s decision will force those migrants to choose between “unbearable” options of leaving the U.S. or remain and risk a formal deportation.

“Either choice creates significant problems for respondents that far exceed any harm to the government,” Justice Jackson said.

The court has been more verbose in the rulings ordering Mr. Trump to grant more rights to those he’s targeting for deportation under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is an attempt to circumvent regular immigration law and speed up the usual deportation process.

“Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court said in one of its rulings.

In another it ordered the government to “facilitate” the un-deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.

Mr. Jenks said the rulings on rolling back Biden-era policies mark a difference from the first Trump term, when the justices were more skeptical of the president’s executive actions.

That included blocking his attempt to end the Obama-era DACA program.

At that time, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led the court in saying the president’s team didn’t give enough thought to the illegal immigrant “Dreamers” who were being protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

This time around, though, the chief justice has not stood in the way as Mr. Trump rolls up a parole program that admitted a half million people, or revokes TPS for Venezuelans.

Jonathan Fahey, a former senior Homeland Security official in the previous Trump administration, said the rulings bode well for Mr. Trump on future immigration cases.

“This might be a good harbinger for other things they’re doing, that they’re going to be deferential to executive branch decisions,” Mr. Fahey said.