On Friday, the United States announced it was terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, giving them a matter of weeks to leave the country.
President Donald Trump has committed to executing the largest deportation campaign in US history and reducing immigration, particularly from Latin American countries.
The move affects around 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who arrived in the United States under a program initiated by President Joe Biden in October 2022 and expanded in January 2023.
These individuals will lose their legal protection 30 days after the Department of Homeland Security’s order is published in the Federal Register, scheduled for Tuesday. This means that unless they obtain a different immigration status, they must leave the US by April 24, according to the order.
Welcome.US, an organization that supports refugees, urged those impacted to seek immediate legal advice from an immigration attorney.
The “Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans” (CHNV) program, launched in January 2023, allowed up to 30,000 migrants per month from these four countries—each with troubling human rights records—to enter the US for a two-year period.
Biden promoted the initiative as a “safe and humane” solution to relieve pressure on the overcrowded US-Mexico border. However, the Department of Homeland Security emphasized on Friday that the program was always intended to be “temporary.”
“Parole is inherently temporary, and parole alone does not serve as a basis for obtaining permanent immigration status, nor does it constitute an official admission to the United States,” the department stated in the order.
In a related move last week, Trump invoked wartime powers to transport over 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador, a country that has agreed to imprison migrants—and even US citizens—at a reduced cost.
AFP
