A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate the temporary legal status of migrants who were flown into the country under Joe Biden’s open border policies.
This time, FOX News reported that an Obama-era appointee, Judge Indira Talwani of Massachusetts, ruled the Trump administration can’t revoke the legal status and work permits of more than half a million migrants who legally entered the U.S. under Biden’s controversial CHNV mass humanitarian parole program.
The roughly 532,000 migrants were allowed into the United States from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela under the CHNV program and can stay for up to two years.
In March, the Trump administration announced plans to halt the CHNV program and end the paroled migrants’ legal protections in the U.S. effective April 24. The migrants were told to leave the U.S. before their humanitarian parole and accompanying work permits are canceled, giving them a month to return to their home countries.
In her order, Talwani wrote that each migrant needs an individualized, case-by-case review. Talwani said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s action—published on March 25 as a notice in the Federal Register and scheduled to take effect 30 days later—was based on a flawed interpretation of immigration law, The Miami Herald reported.
Talwani, a U.S. District Court judge, wrote in a 41-page order filed in Boston federal court that migrants from those nations can remain in the United States and continue to seek permission to work legally or apply for adjustment of status.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration scoffed at Talwani’s ruling, saying that Trump is using his own executive authority, the same authority Biden used, to revoke the parole Biden granted.
“It is pure lawless tyranny,” a Trump administration official told Fox News.
In a previous FOX News report, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Biden officials had “granted them [migrants] opportunities to compete for American jobs and undercut American workers; forced career civil servants to promote the programs even when fraud was identified; and then blamed Republicans in Congress for the chaos that ensued and the crime that followed.”
Biden established the CHNV program in 2023 under his executive parole authority and expanded it to additional countries. The initial program launched in 2022 and applied to Venezuelans, allowing them to stay in the country for two years under a temporary immigration status known as parole.
Under the program, migrants and their immediate family members were flown into the U.S. if they had American sponsors. The Biden administration claimed that CHNV would cut down on illegal crossings at the southern border and create more lawful pathways for migrants to work and live in the U.S.
However, officials temporarily paused the program in 2024 after widespread fraud was found. Several recipients were also arrested for high-profile crimes, including multiple child rapes.
Haitian national Cory B. Alvarez was arraigned in state court in Massachusetts on one count of aggravated rape of a 15-year-old girl at a state-funded migrant shelter in Rockland, according to ice.gov. The Plymouth County Superior Court of Brockton refused to honor an immigration detainer and released Alvarez on $500 bond.
News outlets have reported that as part of Alvarez’s criminal case, prosecutors “repeatedly asked questions” about the specifics of the program but have “received little to no answers.”
“Supporters’ don’t have to be U.S. citizens or even green card holders; even earlier parolees were eligible to sponsor subsequent parolees, as my colleague Nayla Rush has explained,” wrote Andrew Arthur from the Center for Immigration Studies in an August 2024 article on Alvarez’s case. “Apparently, that easily defrauded supporter system was subject to widespread fraud. Who would have guessed?”
The CHNV program has been attributed to the rise in Haitian immigrants overwhelming small communities such as Springfield, Ohio, which made national news during the Trump-Biden presidential debate, and Logansport, Indiana.
The New York Post reported in November that Indiana’s state attorney general planned to investigate whether a “coordinated effort” between nonprofits and employers resulted in thousands of Haitian migrants funneling into small-town Logansport — overwhelming the schools and health system.
