Beneficiaries of the humanitarian parole program established by Joe Biden could lose their legal status in the United States and, consequently, be deported from that country.
This was confirmed by sources linked to the issue, including an official of the Trump administration, cited by the British Reuters news agency.
According to the news outlet, the U.S. government “plans to revoke the parole of some 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans as soon as this month,” while considering doing the same with some 240,000 Ukrainians benefited by Biden.
The migrants affected by this measure could face “expedited deportation proceedings,” says Reuters, which claims to have consulted an internal email from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE).
The report and its sources do not clarify what would happen to the beneficiaries of this program who have already been able to change their status and have U.S. residency, as is the case of Cubans who have been able to benefit from the Cuban Adjustment Act after staying a year in the country.
They also do not refer to those who would be processing a new status and whose applications would be on hold, according to what known last month based on a government memorandum.
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Ukrainians
Although it is not the first time that media and government sources have talked about the issue, the news broke again after President Trump himself referred this Thursday to the specific case of the Ukrainians.
The president assured the press that he would soon decide whether or not to revoke the temporary legal status of some 240,000 Ukrainians who arrived in the United States through the Biden administration, after the conflict between Ukraine and Russia broke out.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about it that they are not looking to hurt anyone, that they are certainly not looking to hurt them, and that he was looking into that. He added that there were people who thought that was appropriate, and people who didn’t, and that he would make the decision very soon, according to Reuters, which had previously reported on these plans.
According to the media, this measure is not directly related to Trump’s position on the war in Ukraine and his recent dispute with Zelensky in the White House. On the contrary, it is part of a government plan to strip the legal status of more than 1.8 million immigrants who arrived in the United States through programs established by the Biden administration.
Before the president’s statement this Thursday and in the wake of leaks and reports on the subject in the media, press secretary Karoline Leavitt had assured that “no decision has been made at this time.”
Biden’s paroles and Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda
Since his election campaign, Trump promised to carry out mass deportations of irregular immigrants in the United States, and once back in the White House he has given priority to the immigration issue within his hectic and controversial government agenda.
Already in the early stages of his second term, the Republican had stopped the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians, as well as the use of the CBP One application.
An official memo also emerged around those days, according to which immigration officials could consider the possibility of stripping the temporary legal status of the beneficiaries of humanitarian parole and other similar programs of the Biden administration.
More recently, an internal memo from the Citizenship and Immigration Service to which the CBS television channel had access confirmed a pause in the processing of applications from immigrants from Latin America and Ukraine who arrived through those programs.
CBS had already reported in February that the Trump administration was preparing to revoke the legal status of many of the migrants who benefited from humanitarian parole, according to internal government documents reviewed by the channel itself.
Although those arriving through Biden’s programs enjoy temporary legal status in the United States, Trump and other officials in his current administration have considered their presence in the United States to be “illegal.” And the president himself, during his campaign, had said that if he won the election he would revoke those programs and deport their beneficiaries.
