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WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory Friday in his immigration crackdown, giving his administration the green light to revoke the legal status of half a million migrants from four Caribbean and Latin American countries.
The decision puts 532,000 people who came from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the United States under a two-year humanitarian “parole” program launched by former president Joe Biden at risk of deportation.
And it marked the second time the highest US court has sided with Trump in his aggressive push to deliver on his election pledge to deport millions of non-citizens, through a series of policy announcements that have prompted a flurry of lawsuits.
But the opinion sparked a scathing dissent from two justices in the liberal minority who said the six conservatives on the bench had “plainly botched” their ruling and undervalued the “devastating consequences” to those potentially affected.
The revoked program had allowed entry into the United States for two years for up to 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries, all of which have dismal human rights records.
But as Trump takes a hard line on immigration, his administration moved to overturn those protections, winning a ruling from the Supreme Court earlier this month that allowed officials to begin deporting some 350,000 Venezuelans.
The latest case resulted from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceling an 18-month extension of the temporary protected status of the migrants, citing in particular the “authoritarian” nature of Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela.
The department gave them 30 days to leave the country unless they had legal protection under another program.
“The court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in their dissent.
The justices said the migrants face being wrenched from family and returning to potential danger in their native countries — or opting to stay and risking imminent removal.
“At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgment regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to that kind of practical impact,” Jackson said.
None of the other justices gave reasons for their decision, and the court was not required to make the vote public.
The district court that barred the administration from revoking the migrants’ status had argued that it was unlawfully applying a fast-track deportation procedure aimed at illegal immigrants to non-citizens protected by government programs.
At the Supreme Court, Justice Department lawyers said the “district court has nullified one of the administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions” by issuing the stay.
The high court’s decision means the Trump administration can go ahead with its policy change, even as the litigation on the merits plays out in lower courts.
Trump campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants, evoking an “invasion” of the United States by hordes of foreign criminals.
Among other measures, he invoked an obscure wartime law to fly more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
But his program of mass deportations has been thwarted or restricted by numerous court rulings, including from the Supreme Court and notably on the grounds that those targeted should be able to assert their due process rights.
And the administration has been berated over its efforts to restrict immigration from poor countries with human rights concerns like Afghanistan and Haiti, while accepting white South African refugees amid baseless claims that they face “genocide.”
The Trump administration systematically accuses judges who oppose his immigration decisions of plundering his presidential national security powers.

Elon Musk's effort to dramatically cut government spending is expected to fall far short of his grand early pronouncements, and perhaps even his most modest goals.
It didn't have to be that way.
According to experts across the ideological spectrum, a major problem was a failure to deploy people who understood the inner workings of government to work alongside his team of software engineers and other high-wattage technology talent.
Even that might not have achieved Musk’s original target of $2 trillion, which is roughly the size of the entire federal deficit.
Musk, whose last day spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency is Friday, slashed his goal for savings from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to finally only $150 billion.
The current DOGE results put Musk's efforts well short of President Bill Clinton's initiative to streamline the federal bureaucracy, which saved the equivalent of $240 billion by the time his second term ended. The effort also reduced the federal workforce by more than 400,000 employees.
It also seems clear that Musk was unable to change the overall trajectory of federal spending, despite eliminating thousands of jobs. The Yale Budget Lab, in an analysis of Treasury data, shows money is flowing out of government coffers at an even faster pace than the previous two years.
“It was an impossible goal they were trying to achieve. They kept lowering the standards of success," said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "A more knowledgeable DOGE team wouldn’t have made insane promises that would be impossible to keep. They set themselves up for failure.”
At a White House event with Trump on Friday, Musk said his team would stay in place and renewed the goal of reaching at least $1 trillion in cost savings.
“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning. The DOGE team will only grow stronger over time. It’s permeating throughout the government,” Musk said in the Oval Office, wearing a black blazer over a T-shirt emblazoned with “The Dogefather.” “We do expect over time to achieve the $1 trillion.” The early evidence suggests that the goal will be exceedingly difficult to reach.
By relying chiefly on information technology experts, Musk ended up stumbling through Washington and sometimes cutting employees vital to President Donald Trump’s own agenda.
Immigration judges were targeted at the same time the administration was trying to accelerate deportations of people in the U.S. illegally. Likewise, technologists with the Bureau of Land Management were purged from the Department of Interior, despite their significance to clearing the way for petroleum exploration, a Trump administration priority.
In many cases, fired employees were rehired, adding administrative costs to an effort aimed at cutting expenditures.
Had Musk’s team been staffed with experts on what positions are required under federal law to continue efforts such as drilling and immigration enforcement, it could have avoided similar mistakes across multiple departments, Nowrasteh said.
“I just think there were a lot of unforced errors that a more knowledgeable DOGE team would have avoided,” Nowrasteh said.
Grover Norquist, president and founder of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, had a more favorable perspective on Musk's work, saying it should be judged not only by the total dollars saved but his ability to spotlight the issues.
“When you find the problem, you don’t know how far the cancer has spread. You just found a cancer cell,” Norquist said.
Norquist said it’s up to Congress to take the baton and set up a permanent structure to continue where Musk is leaving off.
“I just think it’s going to be seen five to 10 years from now as something very big and very permanent,” Norquist said, “and that was done only because of a guy like Musk, who can come in and shake things up.”
Elaine Kamarck, a key figure in Clinton's government efficiency effort, said its efforts were guided by more modest fiscal targets than DOGE. The initiative was led by Vice President Al Gore, and it was aimed at making the government more responsive to people who used it, and focused heavily on updating antiquated hiring and purchasing procedures.
It took years and carried into Clinton’s second term.
“We went about it methodically, department by department and, yes, used some outside analysts, but they were seasoned government civil servants who knew about government in general,” Kamarck said.
Clinton’s effort saved $136 billion by the end of Clinton’s second term, the equivalent of more than $240 billion today, and contributed to budget surpluses for each of the final four fiscal years he was in office.
Kamarck said she expects what she called Musk's “chaotic” approach will reveal mistakes or oversights that could create crises down the road, such as a transportation problem, response to a natural disaster, or delivery of entitlement benefits.
“These are the things that really hurt presidents, and they are increasing the probability that something is going to happen,” Kamarck said.