Roving Periscope: Trump revokes parole; to deport 5 lakh back to nearby nations
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With US President Donald Trump revoking their parole, more than half a million people from neighboring countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela face deportation in the next few weeks, the media reported on Saturday.
Effective April 24, this decision will end a two-year “parole” granted by the preceding Biden administration, allowing these migrants to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.
The latest move is part of President Trump’s ongoing broader immigration enforcement strategy, which seeks to expedite deportation processes for those with revoked status.
The Trump administration will revoke the temporary legal status of nearly 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, the latest expansion of the Republican President’s crackdown on immigration.
President Trump took steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office, including a push to deport record numbers of migrants in the US illegally. He has argued that the legal entry parole programs launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law. He called for their termination in a January 20 executive order he signed the day he took office.
He said on March 6 that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled to the US during the conflict with Russia. His administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.
The then President Joe Biden had launched a parole entry program for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the United States have been strained.
The new legal pathways came as Biden tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.
The Trump administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million migrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the US. It is unclear how many who entered the US on parole now have another form of protection or legal status, the media reported.
In a notice set to formally publish in the Federal Register on Monday, the US Department of Homeland Security said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place the migrants in a fast-track deportation process known as “expedited removal.”
Under a Trump-era policy implemented in January, expedited removal can be applied to certain migrants in the US for two years or less.
