On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani announced she would halt the Trump administration’s effort to end the controversial CHNV parole program, temporarily protecting over 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from losing their legal status and facing deportation.
This ruling comes just days before the Department of Homeland Security was set to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the U.S. under a sponsorship-based program launched by the Biden administration in 2022. These individuals had been granted two-year permits to live and work in the U.S., with the understanding that the status was temporary unless alternative legal avenues for residency were secured.
Now, thanks to Judge Talwani’s decision, the administration’s planned April 24 termination of the program is paused—for now.
Let’s be clear about what this program was. The CHNV parole program was a temporary immigration workaround born from political pressure, not sound immigration policy. It was launched by the Biden administration not to fix the border, but to divert desperate migrants away from it by offering a legal pathway for those with U.S.-based financial sponsors.
This wasn’t a visa, it wasn’t asylum, and it wasn’t legal permanent residency. It was parole—temporary permission to be here, with no long-term plan and no pathway. In short, it was a political patch job for a border crisis that Biden refused to solve through enforcement.
And now, President Trump is doing what he said he would do: restoring legal clarity and enforcing immigration law as written, not as manipulated through executive loopholes. His administration has moved to end these patchwork policies, arguing that temporary parole was never meant to become an open-ended amnesty lite program.
Judge Talwani’s stay is not a ruling on the merits. It’s a pause—a procedural delay while the court considers whether DHS followed proper administrative steps under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The plaintiffs argue that ending the CHNV program was “unprecedented” and violated the APA by failing to adequately justify the decision or follow formal rulemaking processes.
But the Trump administration’s legal team fired back: CHNV was always temporary, and its existence—let alone its continuation—is completely discretionary under immigration law. DHS retains the authority to end parole programs that no longer serve the public interest, and the government says this one doesn’t.
The law is on their side. So is the Constitution.
What’s equally telling is how little political opposition Trump is facing for dismantling the program. Even Democrats are largely silent. The only real pushback has come from a handful of Cuban-American Republicans in Florida, including Rep. Maria Salazar, who’s now cosponsoring a bill with over 200 Democrats to give CHNV parolees permanent residency.
But let’s not pretend that’s a wave. It’s not. The political winds are shifting—and hardline immigration enforcement is no longer radioactive, even among moderates. Voters have seen what chaos looks like. They’ve lived it.
