A federal judge in Boston said she will issue an order staying the federal government’s decision to revoke legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
Lawyers for the immigrant groups asked Judge Indira Talwani to issue an order temporarily blocking the government from ending the humanitarian parole program, sometimes known as CHNV. Without it, more than half a million immigrants who lawfully entered the country could face deportation on April 24.
Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, attended the hearing. Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, she slammed the Trump administration for going after “ people who have become part of our cities and part of our communities.”
“This is about making sure that people who came here legally, people who followed a process, are respected,” she said.
The Department of Homeland Security announced it would slash the humanitarian parole program for the four nationalities last month, following an executive order by President Trump instructing the agency to do so, among other immigration enforcement actions.
A group of American citizens, immigrants and a nonprofit later sued. They called the move to end the program unprecedented and unlawful, and likely to “cause imminent irreparable harm” to roughly 532,000 people who’ve been living and working in the U.S. under the program since 2022.
In response, attorneys for the federal government argued that such an order would be “intruding into the Executive’s exercise of discretionary immigration authority.”
They also said that, given the temporary nature of humanitarian parole, the harms against the immigrants “are outweighed by the harms to the public” and that the secretary of homeland security should be able to “discontinue a program she has determined does not serve the public interest.”
In court Thursday, the judge appeared to side with the plaintiffs, at times intensely questioning an attorney for the government. At one point, she asked whether they were looking to cancel the program because it was a Biden administration initiative.
Talwani said immigrants would face “essentially a hostage choice” on April 24 if she didn’t stay the administration’s order — having to either go back to the country they fled, or stay in the U.S. illegally.
The program was created in 2022 as a streamlined legal route for migrants fleeing economic and political instability, persecution and environmental disasters in their home countries. Its goal was to reduce the number of migrants coming through the southwest border, where officials said an “all-time high” number attempted to cross without authorization in 2022. Border crossings dropped sharply in 2024.
In announcing the program’s termination, DHS said it was both “inconsistent with the [Trump] Administration’s foreign policy goals” and unnecessary now that encounters at the border are considerably lower.
“Whatever the need for these programs may have been in late 2022, the situation at the southwest border now, and the set of tools implemented by DHS to deter illegal immigration, are quite different,” the agency said.
During his campaign, Trump promised to deport millions of people, and as president he has been narrowing legal pathways for immigrants to come and stay in the U.S.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said the narrative that the Trump administration is clamping down only on criminals and people in the country illegally doesn’t hold up.
“Even those people who have legal status, who are here working, paying their taxes, are under attack,” she said.
This article was originally published on April 10, 2025.
