Biden migrant parole program

In South Florida and around the U.S., migrants on legal programs like TPS and humanitarian parole feel trapped between the hope of recent court rulings protecting their status — and the reality of President Trump's determination to expel them.

A federal judge says she will halt the Trump administration from ending a program that allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to temporarily live in the United States.

Refugees had been arriving in the United States at levels unseen in nearly three decades, assisted by nonprofits and ordinary people across the political spectrum. That screeched to a halt after President Donald Trump's inauguration and his administration’s immediate 90-day suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

Like hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans hit by political and economic crises, Johann Teran, his wife and her mother applied for different kinds of humanitarian protections in the United States that the Trump administration has curtailed or is expected to end soon.

In his first week, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S. southern border, reinstated some of his first-term policies and ended programs that allowed people to legally enter the U.S.

U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Miami, is pressing the Trump administration to protect migrants who qualified under former President Biden’s “humanitarian parole” program, which specifically allows Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians to live and work in the country for up to two years.

A memo appears to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to target Biden-era programs that let in more than a million people.

President Joe Biden let in half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans using a tool known as humanitarian parole. President-elect Donald Trump appears certain to dismantle it, saying during his campaign that he would end the ‘outrageous abuse of parole.’

Recent social media posts claimed that migrants can use an app to get free flights to the U.S. People granted parole do not receive free flights to the U.S. They buy their own plane tickets.

The Biden administration has allowed more than one million people without visas to live and work in the United States temporarily into the U.S. over the past three years under an authority called humanitarian parole, including Cubans, Venezuelans and Haitians. Now the program is at the heart of a battle in Congress.

The federal program admits 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. But as President Biden closes in on a deal on border security and Ukraine funding, whether to preserve his authority to allow migrants into the U.S. during emergencies or global unrest is a sticking point.

A year-long tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants arriving in South Florida over the last 50 years was concluded with a moving ceremony in Little Haiti this week, at a pivotal time for the Biden humanitarian migrant parole program.