WASHINGTON: The temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States will be revoked by US President Donald Trump's administration, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration.
The new decision, effective April 24, cuts short a two-year "parole" granted to the migrants under former President Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.
Trump, a Republican, 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 programmes launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law and called for their termination in a January 20 executive order.
Trump 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. Trump's remarks came in response to a Reuters report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.
Biden launched a parole entry programme 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 remains unclear how many who entered the US on parole now have another form of protection or legal status.
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.