WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the country, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration.
The move, effective April 24, cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the migrants under former President Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors. Trump, a Republican, took steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office, including a push to deport record numbers of migrants in the US illegally. Reuters
‘Revoking parole status to expedite deportation’
He has argued that the legal entry parole programmes launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law and called for their termination in a Jan 20 executive order.
Trump said on March 6 that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled to the US during the conflict with Russia. The remarks came in response to a report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.
Biden launched a parole entry programme for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the US have been strained.
The new legal pathways came as Biden tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border. The Trump administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million migrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the US. It remains unclear how many who entered the US on parole now have another form of protection.
In a notice set to formally publish in the Federal Register on Monday, the US department of homeland security said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place the migrants in a fast-track deportation process called “expedited removal”.
Under a Trump-era policy implemented in Jan, expedited removal can be applied to certain migrants in the US for two years or less.
