Left: MIAMI, FL-MARCH 10: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is seen during an Evening with Ketanji Brown Jackson at Chapman Conference Center at MDC Wolfson Campus on March 10, 2025 in Miami, Fla. (Photo by Alberto E. Tamargo/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images). Right: President Donald Trump talks about transgender weightlifters as gives a commencement address at the University of Alabama, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart).
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday cleared the runway for the Trump administration to begin deporting more than 500,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals who have been in the country on a Joe Biden-era humanitarian parole program known by the acronym CHNV.
Acting on an application for a stay, a majority of justices voted to overturn an injunction issued in April by Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, which barred the government from terminating parole for CHNV participants.
Earlier this month, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government’s request for a stay – prompting the appeal to the nation’s high court in the case stylized as Noem v. Doe on May 8.
Writing in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, scorned her colleagues for the decision.
The dissent begins with a short summary of the factors courts look to when considering whether to stay injunctive relief. She focuses on the idea that a party seeking such relief must show “irreparable harm” – a term of art which means a problem that cannot be solved by money alone, either at the time or down the line.
“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson writes. “It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm. And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
The justice also notes that where the issues are close, courts look to balance the hardships of whether or not a stay is granted. Finally, when a case is a tough call, courts analyze public interest concerns. The dissent finds those assessments lacking as well.
“I would have denied the Government’s application because its harm-related showing is patently insufficient,” Jackson goes on. “The balance of the equities also weighs heavily in respondents’ favor. While it is apparent that the Government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage, court-ordered stays exist to minimize — not maximize — harm to litigating parties.”
In its application, the government said it aimed “to correct a recent, destabilizing trend in immigration cases” and painted the district court’s injunction as “a de facto permanent injunction” against the lifting of parole for the CHNV immigrants. In terms of the relevant stay factors, the Trump administration argued the claimed irreparable harms “merge” with the public’s interest – effectively short-circuiting and then soldering two analytical prongs together.
From the application, at length:
Whenever a district court issues a universal injunction against the Executive Branch — even when, as here, it is styled as a classwide “stay” of Executive Branch action based on a rubberstamped nationwide class of some 532,000 aliens — the United States suffers a form of irreparable harm. The President is “a representative of the people” and holds “the mandate of the people to exercise his executive power.” The government has a substantial interest in carrying out the President’s policies. Courts irreparably injure our democratic system when they forbid the government from effectuating those policies against anyone anywhere in the Nation.
“The irreparable harm here is acute,” the application goes on. “The district court’s order stymies the government’s ability to terminate parole grants that the Secretary has determined undermine U.S. interests, and thus it inhibits the government’s pursuit of its foreign policy goals.”
In 2022 and 2023, the Biden administration began allowing certain immigrants fleeing instability in their home countries to stay in the U.S. for an extended period of time if supported financially by someone already here. This year, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in turn, moved to revoke those grants so the immigrants can be deported – while reserving the ability to give back parole on a case-by-case basis. Once the CHNV participants have their parole status revoked, they lose their work status and will be subject to arrest, detention, and deportation.
To hear Jackson tell it, the harms caused by the potentiality of wide-scale deportations is being ignored in favor of the high court simply forecasting that the government will win in the end anyway.
From the dissent, at length (emphasis in original):
The bottom line is this: Our decision to issue a stay (or not) involves more — much more — than merely forecasting the eventual victor; after all, the underlying litigation is designed for and dedicated to determining that. What stays are about, at their core, is an equitable assessment of who will be harmed, and to what extent, during the litigation process, with the ultimate goal of reducing the real-world consequences of the unavoidable, pending-case-related delay.
In other words, the dissent argues the court’s majority dispenses with the typical stay formula in order to give the government a quick win. And Jackson does not see what the rush is all about.
“In this case, the Government has plainly failed to satisfy its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm,” the dissent continues. “DHS contends that the District Court’s order prevents it from exercising its prerogatives with respect to immigration and foreign policy, as a general matter. But it does not establish an urgent need to effectuate blanket CHNV parole terminations now, before the courts can determine whether that en masse agency action is lawful.”
Jackson underscores the lack of urgency by noting that the 1st U.S. Circuit offered to expedite its consideration of the government’s appeal – while the government waited three weeks to file said appeal.
Rather, the justice argues, the CHNV immigrants are the ones facing irreparable harm. The heart of the matter, as the dissent sees it, is the social destruction likely to result from parole revocations.
“Many parole recipients arrived here (at the invitation of the U. S. Government) because their home countries were afflicted by strife or they were otherwise subject to unsafe living or working conditions,” Jackson goes on. “Parolees have sponsors here and, in many cases, have integrated into American neighborhoods and communities in the hopes of eventually securing longterm legal status (e.g., asylum). No one disputes that social and economic chaos will ensue if that many noncitizen parolees are suddenly and summarily remanded.”
As for the government’s arguments, the dissent says the Trump administration offered no evidence beyond the “bald contention” of being harmed when the president’s policies are frustrated.
On balance, Jackson sees an easy call – in the other direction.
“At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgment regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the Government’s application would not have anything close to that kind of practical impact,” the dissent warns.
In a fuming conclusion, Jackson again calls out her colleagues:
Yet, somehow, the Court has now apparently determined that the equity balance weighs in the Government’s favor, and, I suppose, that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims Even assuming a likelihood that the law permits the Government to terminate parole grants in this fashion, I would let the courts decide that highly consequential legal issue first — consistent with standard stay practices and, especially, the necessary harm-centered focus. Instead, the Court allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.
