Judge orders Trump to restore legal status of migrants who used Biden-era app

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated the legal status of thousands of migrants who had been allowed to temporarily live in the U.S. after using an app expanded by the Biden administration to schedule appointments with immigration officials.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston ordered the administration to reverse its move last year to revoke the legal status of migrants who used the CBP One app.

The app was used under former President Joe Biden starting in 2023 to address the crisis at the border by allowing some migrants to make appointments to seek asylum, with many paroled into the country for up to two years, but President Donald Trump moved to shut down the app when he returned to the White House last year.

Burroughs found that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully in April of last year when it sent mass emails to many of the roughly 900,000 people who entered the country using the app, informing them that it was “time for you to leave the United States.”

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“The regulations do not give the agency unfettered discretion to terminate parole,” Burroughs wrote.

“When Defendants terminated the impacted noncitizens’ parole without observing the process mandated by statute and by their own regulations, they took action that was ‘not in accordance with law,'” the judge added.

The Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, one of the plaintiffs in the case, celebrated the ruling, saying it “brings long-awaited relief after months of fear and uncertainty.”

Democracy Forward, another group that helped bring the legal challenge, also praised the judge’s decision.

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“Today’s ruling is a clear rejection of an administration that has tried to erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button,” the group’s president, Skye Perryman, said in a statement.

“Our clients followed the law: they waited, registered, were inspected, and were granted parole under the law. The Trump-Vance administration’s effort to tear that status away overnight was unlawful and cruel — and today, the court rejected that harmful and destabilizing policy,” the statement added.

A DHS spokesperson said the ruling was an example of “blatant judicial activism” that interfered with Trump’s authority to determine who remains in the country.

“Canceling these paroles is a promise kept to the American people to secure our borders and protect our national security,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

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The ruling came after a class-action lawsuit filed in August by three individuals from Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti who argued the Trump administration’s effort to remove them from the country represented an abrupt, unlawful move to pull parole status and work authorization from migrants.

The Trump administration had argued that Biden overstepped parole authority by broadly awarding the status instead of granting it on a case-by-case basis.

Burroughs said when DHS sent out termination notices to migrants, it failed to comply with requirements to provide a record showing an official had determined that the purposes of parole had been served.

“Accordingly, the parole terminations exceeded the agency’s statutory authority and contradicted the procedures set forth in its own regulations,” the judge wrote.

Reuters contributed to this report.