Obama judge blocks Trump’s move to end Biden-era parole program for half a million migrants

A federal judge appointed by the Obama administration blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to end a controversial parole program that allowed roughly half-a-million foreign nationals into the United States.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston, Massachusetts, on Monday temporarily halted the Trump administration’s effort to end a parole program for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals. The parole initiative, more popularly known as the CHNV program, was launched by the Biden administration and allowed roughly 500,000 foreign nationals to be paroled into the country, permitting them to live and work in the U.S. on an interim basis.

The Trump administration in March announced the end of the CHNV program, calling the timing to do so “appropriate and necessary.” However, like virtually every action the White House has taken on immigration policy, the move was swiftly met with legal resistance.

Talwani, appointed to the bench by the Obama administration in 2014, ruled Monday that “the early termination, without any case-by-case justification, of legal status for noncitizens who have complied with DHS programs and entered the country lawfully undermines the rule of law,” according to court documents. “The court finds the balance of equities and public interest weigh in favor of preliminary relief.”

Originally launched by the Biden administration in October 2022 for Venezuelans, the CHNV program was later expanded in January 2023 to include Cuban, Nicaraguan and Haitian nationals. The mass parole initiative gave non-citizens two-year authorization to live in the U.S. and work permits, provided they had not previously illegally entered the country and cleared other vetting processes.

However, CHNV quickly began taking criticism for its intended purpose and incidents of fraud. Republicans accused the Biden White House of using CHNV — and other maneuvers, like the expansion of the CBP One app — to allow otherwise-inadmissible migrants into the country en masse as a way to loosen pressure on the southern border, which was experiencing a massive crisis at the time.

During its peak, CHNV was flying around 30,000 migrants into the U.S. every month, allowing them to circumvent the U.S.-Mexico border entirely.

In August 2024, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security confirmed the CHNV program was placed on pause following an internal audit that uncovered rampant fraud. The internal report uncovered a slate of red flags, such as 100,948 CHNV forms being completed by just 3,218 sponsors, 24 of the 1,000 most used Social Security numbers by sponsors belonging to a deceased person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used over 1,300 times, among other discrepancies.

In October 2024, the Biden administration announced it would not be renewing parole for CHNV enrollees, meaning the program was ultimately intended to end regardless of who won the presidential election that year. The Trump administration in March hastened the end of the program and began sending notices to CHNV enrollees later that month.

Had Trump’s ending of CHNV not been blocked, enrollees would’ve been mandated to leave the U.S. by April 24 or else face deportation.

The Trump White House has worked to dismantle numerous other Biden-era migrant programs, such as the CBP One app which allowed foreign nationals to apply for asylum at a port of entry. The Trump administration immediately terminated the app, relaunched a new version that allows migrants to instead declare their intention to self-deport and began warning those who entered the U.S. through CBP One to leave immediately.

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