The U.S. Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump another victory on his immigration agenda but is still slowing mass deportations. The nation’s highest court issued a stay of a lower court’s order on Friday, allowing the president and his deputies to roll back parole granted by the previous administration to over half a million noncitizens, most of them illegal immigrants. Democrat-appointed Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority, while Justice Elena Kagan, another Democratic appointee, sided with the Republican-appointed justices in permitting the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to revoke parole.

Earlier this year, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem moved to terminate parole grants the Biden administration gave to approximately 530,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan nationals, many of whom had entered the U.S. illegally but were shielded from deportation by the parole grants. Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, who was appointed by Barack Obama, blocked the DHS maneuver in April. Talwani argued that because parole statutes require the DHS secretary to grant parole on a case-by-case basis, the secretary must also revoke parole on a case-by-case basis and cannot “categorically terminate grants of parole,” dismissing the Trump administration’s contention that Noem’s predecessor, Alejandro Mayorkas, violated those statutes by categorically granting parole.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit subsequently upheld Talwani’s injunction but did not share her certainty in interpreting the statutes governing parole. “The statute is clear that parole in the first instance is to be granted only on a case-by-case basis,” the appellate court stated, adding, “The statutory text is less clear regarding the termination of parole. Common sense suggests (but does not dictate) that parole given only on a case-by-case basis is to be terminated only on such a basis.” In early May, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer appealed the injunction to the Supreme Court.

“The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) … vests the Secretary of Homeland Security with broad discretion over categories of immigration determinations, and precludes judicial review of such discretionary determinations,” Sauer wrote in his petition. He continued, “Specifically, the INA permits the Secretary to grant parole to aliens ‘on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,’ and it permits the Secretary to revoke that parole whenever ‘the purposes of such parole shall, in the opinion of the Secretary of Homeland Security, have been served.’” The Trump administration attorney also noted, “The previous Administration granted parole categorically to aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, resulting in the parole of 532,000 aliens into the United States.” However, since Talwani “engaged in the very review Congress prohibited,” he wrote, the Trump administration cannot remove the noncitizens imported by the Biden administration.

The Supreme Court stayed Talwani’s order, allowing Noem to continue revoking the parole granted to over 530,000 noncitizens by the previous administration. While the Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning in the brief unsigned order, Jackson wrote a seven-page dissent, which was joined by Sotomayor. The Biden-appointed justice claimed that her fellow justices had “botched” their judicial responsibilities and wrote that the majority’s decision “undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.” Jackson explicitly stated that restricting the president from enacting his immigration agenda and forcing the administration to keep 530,000 noncitizens in the country unnecessarily “is patently insufficient” to demonstrate harm to the Trump administration, but that the “predecision damage” done to noncitizens is irreparable.

Just a few weeks before, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a similar case, blocking an injunction from Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California which in turn had blocked Noem from revoking temporary protected status (TPS) given to around 300,000 Venezuelan nationals by the Biden administration. In that instance, Jackson was the sole dissenter, as both Kagan and Sotomayor agreed with the Republican-appointed majority.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Center for Immigration Studies Senior Legal Fellow George Fishman recounted, “The Biden administration abused the rule of law by ‘paroling’ into the United States over half a million inadmissible aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and President Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors partially as a result.” He continued, “The Supreme Court has, at least for now, allowed the Trump administration to terminate Biden’s unlawful programs. Aliens who will have their parole revoked will lose work authorization and other benefits of parole status.” Fishman added, “However, with a 3.6 million-case backlog in our immigration courts, I wouldn’t expect many aliens to be removed any time soon.”

While Friday’s decision is technically a victory for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court has been slow to respond to lower courts’ unprecedented use of sweeping universal injunctions and is actively impeding some of the administration’s most significant deportation efforts. The justices recently heard arguments in a case centered on the president’s executive order terminating birthright citizenship, but the administration focused its arguments on the at least 25 universal injunctions imposed on the president’s agenda since January 20. Then-acting U.S. Solicitor General Sarah Harris asserted, “Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current Administration.”

She continued, “District courts have issued more universal injunctions and TROs during February 2025 alone than through the first three years of the Biden Administration. That sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions, and threatens to swamp [the Supreme] Court’s emergency docket.”

The justices have yet to reach a decision in the case, although they are expected to by early July. During oral arguments, some of the more conservative-aligned members of the Supreme Court, such as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, indicated a willingness to curb district courts’ use of universal injunctions, but most centered their questions on what mechanisms might be used in place of universal injunctions to afford universal relief when necessary.

In another instance, the Supreme Court has stalled the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to detain and deport Venezuelan nationals affiliated with the international criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which has been officially classified as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Relying on long-standing precedent, the Supreme Court has affirmed that the AEA’s use is exempted from judicial review except in the case of habeas corpus petitions, but has intervened in those habeas proceedings and halted the deportation of TdA members currently in custody, stipulating that the Trump administration must provide detainees slated for deportation with more than 24 hours’ notice before deporting them, in order to allow terrorist gang affiliates an opportunity to file habeas petitions.

Thomas and Alito have both opposed the court’s intervention, with Alito dubbing some of the court’s actions “unprecedented and legally questionable…” The president has also criticized the Supreme Court’s actions in the case, saying in a social media post, “The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do. Sleepy Joe Biden allowed MILLIONS of Criminal Aliens to come into our Country without any ‘PROCESS’ but, in order to get them out of our Country, we have to go through a long and extended PROCESS.”

While administration officials, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff and immigration policy architect Stephen Miller, have stressed that time is of the essence in executing the president’s mass deportation program, the Supreme Court has emphasized that the administration can carry out deportations but must do so in a manner consistent with the justices’ interpretation of the Constitution. “We recognize the significance of the Government’s national security interests as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution,” the court wrote in an unsigned order pertaining to the case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained that the federal judiciary needs time to “decide whether these Venezuelan detainees may be lawfully removed under the Alien Enemies Act before they are in fact removed” and, if they can be lawfully removed, “what notice is due before removal.”