By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration.
It will be effective April 24.
The move cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the migrants under former President Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had U.S. sponsors.
Trump, a Republican, took steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office, including a push to deport record numbers of migrants in the U.S. illegally. He has argued that the legal entry parole programs launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law and called for their termination in a January 20 executive order.
Trump said on March 6 that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled to the U.S. during the conflict with Russia. Trump’s remarks came in response to a Reuters report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.
Biden launched a parole entry program for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the United States have been strained.
The new legal pathways came as Biden tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Trump administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million migrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the U.S. It remains unclear how many who entered the U.S. on parole now have another form of protection or legal status.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson and Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Mary Milliken and Matthew Lewis)
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