HOUSTON, United States

The US Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the Trump administration can revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The temporary legal status given to 532,000 people from those countries was granted under the Biden administration, starting in 2022, and included permission for them to temporarily live and work in the United States.

The so-called CHNV, or Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan, parole program was implemented, in part, to alleviate the surge of immigrants arriving at the US-Mexico border. It allowed people who passed a security check to enter the US legally and stay for two years, as long as they had a sponsor who could provide housing.

But the Supreme Court lifted the lower court order that kept those humanitarian parole protections in place, and in a separate case, the nation's highest court also allowed the government to revoke the temporary legal status of another 350,000 Venezuelan migrants.

US District Judge Indira Talwani from the state of Massachusetts originally ruled that the Trump administration could not sweep away each person’s status without an individualized determination.

The Supreme Court disagreed, and even though Friday's order is not a final ruling, it means that the protections for more than a half million immigrants from those four countries will not remain in place while the lawsuit proceeds.

Liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with Jackson writing that the court failed to take into account "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 case now returns to the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.