WASHINGTON, United States (CMC) — The United States (US) Supreme Court on Friday gave the Donald Trump administration the green light to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including those from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The move by the Supreme Court means that nearly one million people are now likely to be deported by the Trump administration.

The United States’ highest court lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from the four countries, allowing the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case.

President Trump promised on the campaign trail to deport millions of people, and in office, has sought to dismantle Biden administration policies that created ways for migrants to live legally in the US.

Earlier this week, the San Diego, California-based immigrant advocacy group, Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA), welcomed a United States federal district court judge’s ruling in Boston, ordering the Trump administration to restore processing of immigration benefit applications for Caribbean and other humanitarian parole recipients.

HBA’s Executive Director, Guerline Jozef, told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) on Wednesday that the court also certified various classes to ensure that all individuals inside the United States in the various parole programmes, who do not have their own individual litigation pending on the challenged agency policies, can benefit from the relief ordered.

Jozef said the ruling covers beneficiaries of the following humanitarian parole processes: Uniting for Ukraine, Operation Allies Welcome, Central American Minors Parole, Family Reunification Parole, Military Parole-in-Place, and the process that’s available to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, known as “CHNV humanitarian parole”.

She has, however, been unavailable for comment on the Supreme Court ruling on Friday.

According to the court documents, Trump had said Haitian immigrants in Ohio with legal status under the humanitarian parole programme were abducting and eating pets during his only debate with President Joe Biden.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that the effect of the court’s order is “to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims”. Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.

The Supreme Court judge seconded what US District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in the ruling that ending the legal protections early would leave people with a stark choice: flee the country or risk losing everything.

Talwani, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, found that revocations of parole can be done, but on a case-by-case basis.

While the Supreme Court’s order is not a final ruling, it means the protections will not be in place while the case proceeds. It now returns to the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

The Justice Department had argued that the protections were always meant to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court interference. The administration says Biden granted the parole en masse, and the law doesn’t require ending it on an individual basis.

The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals the administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration.