The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to proceed with a plan to revoke deportation protections for migrants from four troubled countries.
In an emergency application to the justices, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to lift a block imposed by a lower court on its effort to reverse a Biden administration program that had allowed migrants from certain countries to fly into the United States and remain temporarily.
“This court’s immediate intervention is warranted,” Mr. Sauer wrote in the application, adding that a lower court had “nullified one of the administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions.”
The Biden administration introduced the program, known as humanitarian parole, in early 2023. Under the policy, migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela could fly into the United States if they had a financial sponsor and passed security checks. Approximately 532,000 people entered the country under the program, which allowed them to remain for up to two years.
The emergency application is the latest in a series of high-profile Trump administration policies to come before the Supreme Court since President Trump began his second term, including several that test the legality of Mr. Trump’s sweeping efforts to deport migrants. Earlier this week, the justices sided with the administration, determining that the federal government may start enforcing a ban on transgender troops serving in the military that had been blocked by lower courts.
On the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, he moved to end the humanitarian parole program. It was among a series of measures that the Biden administration had introduced, including ones offering refuge to people fleeing Ukraine, Haiti and Latin America. The goal was to discourage people from crossing the border illegally by allowing them to apply in a more orderly fashion from their home countries.
Still, Trump administration officials had been sharply critical of it, notably Stephen Miller, a senior aide to Mr. Trump.
In September, Mr. Miller, a primary architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, railed against the policy on social media.
“Here’s an idea: Don’t fly millions of illegals aliens from failed states thousands of miles away into small towns across the American Heartland,” Mr. Miller wrote.
In February, migrants and an immigration nonprofit sued the Trump administration, claiming that the termination of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and unconstitutional.”
On March 25, a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily paused the administration’s revocation of the program. The court determined that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked authority to categorically revoke parole for all 532,000 people without providing individualized, case-by-case reviews.
The trial court, Mr. Sauer argued, had “engaged in the very review Congress prohibited — needlessly upending critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core executive branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”
On May 5, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s temporary block, finding that Ms. Noem had not made a “strong showing” that her “categorical termination” of humanitarian parole for all migrants was likely to survive a court challenge.
The justices have requested a response from the challengers by 4 p.m. on May 15.
