A lawsuit filed by a group of immigrants and U.S. citizens aims to revive a series of Biden-era humanitarian parole programs ended by the Trump administration.
Humanitarian parole is an emergency immigration status that allows recipients to stay in the U.S. temporarily. President Joe Biden used the authority to create legal pathways for Afghans fleeing persecution after the U.S. exit, along with two others for Ukrainians, Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans to come to the U.S. with the help of a sponsor.
President Donald Trump moved to cancel programs upon entering office. Bill Richardson — a U.S. Marine veteran and retired police detective in Phoenix — has been helping female Afghan soldiers who worked alongside the U.S. resettle in Arizona. He says many of them have asylum now, but their loved ones are still in limbo.
“Many still have family stuck in Afghanistan, who are in the process of being allowed to come to the United States, either as relatives or through the special immigrant visa process. That's all been frozen,” he said. “Things were progressing not rapidly, but slowly, which is the Washington way, until Trump came into office and everything stopped. And what’s happening now, the conversations I’ve had with people in Afghanistan is, hope is pretty much gone.”
Attorney Karen Tumlin, founder and director of the Justice Action Center, is representing the plaintiffs in a suit to revive the humanitarian parole programs. She says their cancellation is unfounded.
“The only reason that was stated in the Day 1 executive order was that, was the belief that the categorical use of parole is always unlawful,” she said.
Tumlin’s suit, filed late Friday, says the humanitarian parole authority has been used broadly for more than 70 years by both Republican and Democratic administrations.
"This lawsuit challenges the steps the Trump administration has taken to radically limit what had up to this point been a broad power granted by Congress to allow the executive to respond to migration challenges, address global humanitarian crises, and further important foreign policy objectives in a flexible and adaptive way," the suit reads. "At the same time that it has terminated these parole processes for their alleged illegality and suspended the ability of parolees to obtain forms of immigration relief to which Congress has made them entitled, DHS has also taken aggressive action — challenged separately — to make it easier to deport individuals paroled through these processes as quickly as possible."
The suit includes nine individuals who are recipients of humanitarian parole programs, along with two U.S. sponsors and the advocacy group, Haitian Bridge Alliance.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about the programs or the suit.
