A federal judge in Boston said she expects to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s effort to end Family Reunification Parole, a program that provides temporary legal protections to more than 10,000 family members of U.S. citizens and green card holders, according to court proceedings described by the Associated Press.
At a hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said she planned to issue a temporary restraining order, though she did not say when the order would be issued. The case, which involves five named plaintiffs, is part of a broader effort by the administration to end temporary legal protections for multiple groups, the AP reported.
The program at the center of the case—Family Reunification Parole, or FRP—was described as offering temporary protections put in place during the Biden administration. According to the AP, the Department of Homeland Security terminated the protections late last year, and the plaintiffs and their attorneys said many participants were set to lose the legal protections by Jan. 14.
Lawyers argued that the parole process was not brief or transitional in the way the government’s approach implies. In filings discussed by AP, the plaintiffs said the people in the program came to the United States not temporarily, but to “get a jump-start on their new lives,” often arriving with immediate family members. They also told the court that FRP parolees had obtained employment authorization documents, found jobs, and enrolled children in school.
The government argued in court that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has the authority to terminate any parole program and that it provided adequate notice by publishing the termination in the federal registry. It also said ending the program was necessary for national security purposes because the people had not been properly vetted, the AP reported.
In describing the government’s position, Katie Rose Talley, a lawyer for the government, told the court that “Parole can be terminated at any time” and that “That is what is being done,” adding that “There is nothing unlawful about that,” according to AP’s account of the hearing.
Talwani, while indicating she understood that the government can end the program, questioned the manner in which it ended it. AP reported that Talwani took issue with the way the government said it alerted people, demanding that the government show how it had notified affected individuals through a written notice such as a letter or email, rather than relying solely on registry publication.
Justin Cox, an attorney who works with the Justice Action Center and argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the government, after inviting people to apply, was “now laying traps between those people and getting the green card,” describing the outcome as “incredibly inequitable,” according to AP.
The AP said the case is linked to the program’s reach beyond the named plaintiffs, with lawyers seeking rulings that would cover everyone in the program. The affected participants were described as coming from Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Honduras.
The FRP case also fits within a wider set of court fights involving temporary immigration protections. AP reported that last month the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants in a separate set of cases, increasing the number of people newly exposed to deportation to nearly 1 million. In that decision, the justices lifted an order that had kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, AP said, while two justices dissented publicly.