By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – A federal judge blocked 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 issued her order after finding the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s decision to cut short a two-year parole granted to the migrants under former President Joe Biden was based on an incorrect reading of the law.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic former 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 the focus of that statute was 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.
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 and quickly became the subject of litigation.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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