A federal judge said on Friday she will block U.S. President Donald Trump's administration from cutting short temporary legal status for roughly 10,000 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 during a hearing in Boston said she plans to issue 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 move, part of Trump's hardline 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."
