By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal judge said she will block President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s decision to cut short a two-year parole granted to the migrants under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden was based on an incorrect reading of the law.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said the administration wanted to expose about 450,000 people to expedited deportation effective April 24 based on a wrong interpretation of the statute governing the process.
She said that law focused on people who illegally crossed the border and providing a means to remove them on an expedited basis, not individuals who were granted permission to enter the United States under a grant of parole.
“What you’re prioritizing is not people coming over the border but the people who followed the rules,” Talwani said.
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Talwani’s ruling came in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s decision to pause various Biden-era parole programs that have allowed Ukrainian, Afghan, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants to enter the country.
The administration’s action, announced in a Federal Register notice published last month, marked an expansion of the Republican president’s hardline crackdown on immigration.
While that lawsuit was pending, the administration moved to end the two-year parole granted to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelan migrants that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had U.S. sponsors.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in BostonEditing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
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