Like hundreds of thousands of other legal migrants in the U.S. right now, Peter feels as though the country he's long admired as a paragon of rules has gone back on its word.
At home in Broward County after his shift as a parcel deliveryman, the young Haitian opened up recently about the prospect of losing his humanitarian parole a year earlier than expected.
“I’m speechless about that," said Peter, who asked WLRN not to use his full name to protect his identity.
"It’s like someone is taking my heart out of my chest," he said.
Peter echoes the reaction of more than 500,000 other migrants to last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that, for now, allows President Donald Trump and his administration to strip them of their humanitarian parole.
Former President Biden launched the so-called CHNV program in October 2022 to control the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border and provide “safe and orderly pathways” to the U.S. for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. The migrants were fleeing the brutal dictatorships and gang violence in their countries. Under CHNV, they were told they remain legally in the U.S., with work permits, for two years.
During that time, they could work to adjust their immigration status to something more permanent, like asylum, with a path toward U.S. citizenship.
But, as in the case of Peter — who came to the U.S. on through humanitarian parole to escape the gangs that are now Haiti's de facto rulers and had taken control of his Port-au-Prince neighborhood — their grace periods now stand to be cut short, making them immediately deportable.
“We were promised to stay for two years," said Peter. "We just have some time to breathe, and then they tell you, ‘You’re going back right now to the same situation.’”
Still, the Supreme Court ruling is not the final word.
The justices said litigation against Trump’s efforts to cancel humanitarian parole for the 530,000 CHNV migrant beneficiaries can still play out in the lower federal courts. And, as it does, you can expect to hear a lot of that word Peter used: “promise.”
“What it’s boiled down to is a broken contract," said Laura Flores-Perilla, an attorney with the nonprofit Justice Action Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, which is one of the plaintiffs challenging Trump on humanitarian parole in federal district court in Boston.
Although Flores-Perilla says the “broken contract” principle may not be the exact legal argument the litigants are making in this case, they believe it helps explain why Trump’s action is unlawful.
“The [migrant] beneficiaries followed all the steps that the government required of them. The government now is pulling the rug from under them and — and breaking that promise.”
READ MORE: Trump now targets immigrants with temporary legal status. Is an outdated U.S. system to blame?
Plaintiffs like Justice Action Center are, of course, presenting other considerations in the Boston federal court — where in April a federal judge had halted Trump's CHNV parole cancellation. Those include the reality that the four countries involved are still judged too dangerous politically and disastrous economically to send migrants back to; and, the Trump administration's alleged failure to show the urgency of severing the migrants' paroles before their expiration.
Still, many immigration lawyers feel the assertion that Trump is betraying a contractual agreement with those migrants' is one of the strongest pitches.
Some — especially in South Florida, where most of those parole beneficiaries reside — argue the case involves a legal principle known as promissory estoppel.
“If the previous administration made a promise to the beneficiaries, the next one needs to abide by the promise," said Frandley Julien, a Haitian-American attorney in North Miami.
"Otherwise there’s no value in signing international treaties.”
“It boils down to a broken contract. They followed all the steps the government required — now it's pulling the rug from under them."Laura Flores-Perilla
Julien notes the promissory estoppel principle, however, is focused on domestic jurisdiction. Legal experts agree it may be a stretch to apply it in an international law context in this case — even if the people the U.S. government made the promise to are from foreign countries.
“The problem is that for this to be binding on a [government] internationally, the person who grants the promise needs to be someone who has full powers to represent the [government] internationally,” said Pablo Rueda Saiz, an international law expert at the University of Miami who closely watches immigration.
And, Rueda Saiz points out, former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — who granted the CHNC humanitarian parole — is not one of those persons.
Fees and flights
Even so, Rueda Saiz feels promissory estoppel could still apply in this case in a domestic sense.
Under the legal reasoning, he says, while Trump may have executive prerogative to stop the CHNV humanitarian parole program for future recipients — just as former President Biden had the executive discretion to establish it — he can't so peremptorily wipe it away for current beneficiaries.
“There I think that an argument can be made that there was a specific obligation made by the federal government, domestically, that needs to be honored," said Rueda Saiz.
"If the Trump administration wants to end the humanitarian parole, they can do so. But they have to respect the conditions of the people to whom it has already been granted.”
Immigrant advocates insist that's especially true given that the parole recipients spent money under the program for fees and flights.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, argues the CHNV parole is itself unlawful — an "abuse," as current Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calls it, of the humanitarian parole mechanism, which includes nationals from other distressed countries such as Ukraine and Afghanistan.
But last year a federal court upheld the CHNV parole.
Trump is also trying to revoke other immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. He wants to accelerate the expiration of that benefit, which was created by Congress, for about 1 million other migrants from Haiti and Venezuela — as well as asylum. But those have long been ruled lawful as well.
(TPS allows people already living in the United States to stay and work legally for up to 18 months — which can be renewed — if their homelands are unsafe because of civil unrest or natural disasters.)
Critics, as a result, say Trump is simply targeting large groups of legal migrants like TPS and humanitarian parole holders in order to make them illegal overnight — and pump up the numbers of his sweeping migrant deportation crusade.
And immigration attorneys who’ve never considered the breach-of-promise argument before are listening now.
“If you let migrants in under certain rules, and then overnight you tell them, ‘Listen, no, now you’re gonna be deported from the U.S.,’ after they follow those rules, then as an argument in federal courts, I think it makes a lot of sense,” said Venezuelan-American attorney John De la Vega of Miami.
Humanitarian parole beneficiaries themselves agree.
Among them is Junior, a Venezuelan migrant and business manager living in Broward County, who came to escape regime persecution back home — including a destructive police raid at his home because of his participation in protests against the Nicolás Maduro dictatorship.
Junior's parole isn’t supposed to end until next year. And as he ponders the possibility if not the likelihood of seeing his parole terminated before he can complete his application for asylum, he feels the U.S. government’s word is now at issue in this case.
“My goal was to get my two years, figure out what I do to make my status legal permanently — become a U.S. citizen — and do it the right way," Junior, who also asked WLRN not to use his full name, said over a guayoyo, or Venezuelan coffee, at a Broward restaurant.
"So when [Trump] cuts you short like this, you feel like it’s…not fair. It gets me angry, but as much as you want to see it as a legal, binding contract," he adds, shrugging, "I guess politicians can do whatever they want.”
Humanitarian parole plaintiffs insist cases like this are about making sure politicians like Trump cannot do whatever they want on immigration.
Especially, they say, break U.S. government promises.
