Deportations: A crackdown on legal migrants

Paul Christian Namphy addresses Trump's new policy to revoke parole protections

Trump's administration is trying to deport "just about anyone it can conceivably fit into the system"

(Image credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

President Trump "wants to put big deportation numbers on the scoreboard," said Philip Bump in The Washington Post, and the Supreme Court just gave him an assist. In a 7-2 emergency ruling last week, the justices cleared the way for the Trump administration to revoke the Biden-era humanitarian parole protections awarded to 530,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela while litigation continues in lower courts. Those people "came here legally and with the government's blessing"—just like the 350,000 Venezuelans who lost temporary protected status after a similar ruling in May. But Trump is frustrated that he's lagging on his pledge to remove "millions" of undocumented migrants—about 17,200 people were deported in April, 29% more than a year earlier—and so his administration is trying to deport "just about anyone it can conceivably fit into the system." Meeting deportation quotas by "hunting down actual criminals is hard," said Catherine Rampell, also in the Post. It's much easier for agents to "catch" de-documented migrants who voluntarily told the government where they live.

It may seem unfair, said Dan McLaughlin in National Review, but the administration is acting within its powers. The lower-court judges who tried to block the White House from rolling back immigrant parole programs treated them as "a one-way ratchet in which Trump was not allowed to undo what Biden had done by the same means." The justices have so far found the right balance on immigration: giving the administration "a lot of room to maneuver in making general decisions of immigration policy," while "drawing a red line around the application of laws to individual immigrants and defending their right" to due process.

Constitutional or not, Americans will be hurt by this mass revocation of visas, said Valentina Palm in The Palm Beach Post. About 80% of the affected humanitarian parole recipients live in Florida, and many work in critical "industries facing labor shortages, including health care, education, hospitality, and construction." Economic concerns aside, no one should "be forced to return to a dictatorship in Venezuela, or gang rule in Haiti, because of the whim of a particular president," said the Miami Herald in an editorial. This "chaotic scenario" would never have happened if Congress had done its job years ago and passed meaningful immigration reform. But our leaders failed to step up—and now "our neighbors, friends, relatives, and co-workers" will pay the price.