Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans could face deportation from April 24.
United States President Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 people including Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice.
The move, the latest expansion of Trump’s crackdown on immigration, is effective from April 24, and cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the immigrants under former President Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.
A group of American citizens and immigrants sued the Trump administration for ending humanitarian parole and are seeking to reinstate the programmes for the four nationalities.
Biden launched the 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 undocumented immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the United States have been strained.
The new legal pathways came as Biden also tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.
Trump, who campaigned on a harsh anti-immigration line, took immediate steps to ramp up enforcement after taking office, including a push to deport record numbers of people who reside in the US without official documentation.
He has argued that the legal entry parole programmes launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law, and he called for their termination in a January 20 executive order.
His administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million immigrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the US.
It remains unclear how many who entered the country on parole now have another form of protection or legal status.
In a notice set to be formally published in the Federal Register on Monday, the US Department of Homeland Security said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place these immigrants in a fast-track deportation process known as “expedited removal”.
Karen Tumlin, director of immigrant rights group Justice Action Center, said the Trump administration was “breaking a commitment the federal government made to the hundreds of thousands” of immigrants and their sponsors in the United States.
“Suddenly revoking the lawful status of hundreds of thousands of CHNV (Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans) humanitarian parole recipients is going to cause needless chaos and heartbreak for families and communities across the country,” she told the AFP news agency in a statement.
Nicolette Glazer, an immigration lawyer in California, said the latest order would affect the “vast majority” of the half a million immigrants who entered the United States under the CHNV scheme. “The chaos will be unreal,” she added on X.
On March 6, Trump said he would also decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled to the US during the war with Russia.
Under a Trump-era policy implemented in January, expedited removal can be applied to certain immigrants in the US for two years or less.
In the meantime, Venezuela has reached an agreement to resume repatriation flights of immigrants from the United States, the Venezuelan government said in a statement Saturday. “Migrating isn’t a crime, and we won’t rest until everyone who wants to return is back and we rescue our kidnapped brothers in El Salvador,” the statement said.