Deportations: A crackdown on legal migrants

The Supreme Court will allow Trump to revoke protections for over 500,000 immigrants

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.

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