The court stayed the order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that halted the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 of these migrants by former President Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to immediate removal while the case is heard in lower courts.
Immigration parole is a type of temporary authorization granted by American law to enter the nation for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” which allows grantees to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s strategy for deterring illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let it go ahead with ending legal protections for migrants from Syria. This was the latest emergency appeal to the highest court in the country.
The government is also asking for a wider ruling that could affect other cases about protecting people from other countries as the administration tries to crack down on immigration.
According to court records, about 6,100 people from Syria have temporary legal status after leaving their homes because of armed conflict.
The first protections for Syrians came in 2012, during a civil war that lasted more than ten years and ended with the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acted to revoke protected status less than a year later, finding that the situation “no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals.”
The administration says that the department can give or take away the temporary protections and that judges shouldn’t get involved.
DHS has taken steps to take away legal protections that let immigrants from many countries stay in the US and work legally.
That includes more than a million people from Venezuela and Haiti all together.
A different judge in Washington recently stopped the government from taking away protections for 350,000 Haitians.
The administration has won a number of cases on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, which lets it move forward with important parts of Trump’s agenda.