President Donald Trump’s White House has been feuding for months now with a series of district court judges who have been hampering the president’s agenda through sweeping preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Despite the recent involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court, that feud is seemingly far from over, with another federal judge issuing an order Monday blocking the Trump administration from ending a “humanitarian parole” program that was expanded under the Biden administration to usher over half a million illegal immigrants into the country and shield them from deportation.

Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, who was appointed by Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the president from ending a program benefitting approximately 530,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (referred to by Talwani as the CHNV program) immigrants who entered the country illegally and claimed asylum. In her order, Talwani argued that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary “does not have the discretion to categorically terminate grants of parole,” although she admitted that the Secretary does have the discretion to categorically grant parole. She wrote, “In any event, the parole statute establishes standards for the Secretary’s exercise of discretion in granting parole … and the statute also establishes standards for the termination of parole by requiring a determination by the Secretary that ‘the purposes of such parole … have been served…’”

Talwani claimed that the president and his deputies “gave no explanation or support for the conclusion that the CHNV programs were addressing relevant humanitarian concerns through something other than case-by-case determinations” and “also gave no rationale for its conclusion that such humanitarian concerns no longer justified the existing parole programs and offered no reasons for categorically revoking parole despite the humanitarian concerns previously articulated by [the Biden administration’s] DHS.” She argued that “DHS was required to give a justification for terminating existing grants of parole within 30 days instead of on the original termination dates.” Talwani concluded, “Therefore … the early termination of parole was arbitrary and capricious.”

The judge also posited that the DHS Secretary has no authority to “categorically” terminate parole grants, but must consider each parole grant on a “case-by-case” basis prior to termination. “The grant of parole may well have been justified for reasons not applicable to others paroled through the programs, such that a categorical determination that the ‘purposes of such parole’ have been served may not attend to the reasons for that individual’s grant of parole,” Talwani wrote. She continued, “Certainly, the Secretary has significant discretion to terminate a grant of parole under the statute. But by the terms of the statute, such termination must attend to the reasons an individual alien received parole.”

Thus, Talwani ordered that the Trump administration’s termination of the parole grants be stayed “pending further court order insofar as it revokes, without case-by-case review, the previously granted parole and work authorization issued to noncitizens paroled into the United States…” Talwani indicated last week that she would issue the order shielding the illegal immigrants from the Trump administration’s efforts to end the parole program. “The nub of the problem here is that the [DHS] secretary, in cutting short the parole period afforded to these individuals, has to have a reasoned decision,” the judge said in a hearing on Thursday.

The order from Talwani follows one from Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for Northern California, another Obama appointee, who blocked the Trump administration from revoking the temporary protected status (TPS) given to over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals by the Biden administration. The judge argued that although a president has the authority to expand TPS to include hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, another president does not have the authority to restrict TPS even to the status quo of five or six years prior. “The unprecedented action of vacating existing TPS (a step never taken by any previous administration in the 35 years of the TPS program) … reverses actions taken by the Biden administration to extend temporary protection of Venezuelan nationals that have been in place since 2021,” Chen wrote.

The U.S. Supreme Court has waded into the conflict between the White House and the federal judiciary within the past few weeks. Although the nation’s highest court has sided with the Trump administration in vacating or staying the restrictive orders of inferior courts, particularly relating to immigration and deportations, the Supreme Court has yet to address the increasingly frequent use of nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders at the district court level.