On Friday, the Cato Institute and I filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in Noem v. Doe, a case where the Trump Administration is trying to terminate parole status for over 500,000 legal immigrants from four Latin American nations. The brief is available here. Here’s a summary of the brief I prepared for the Cato website:
In early 2023, the Department of Homeland Security established a program under which citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (“CHNV”) were eligible to request two years of humanitarian parole into the United States if someone lawfully present in the United States was willing to sponsor them and commit to providing financial and other support. The policy was based on the highly successful Uniting for Ukraine parole program and a more limited parole program for Venezuelan nationals, both of which began in 2022, with the important difference that the number of CHNV parolees was capped at a total of 30,000 per month.
Parole under the CHNV program was granted for two-year terms. In 2025, the new Administration attempted to cut short all of those two-year terms for over 500,000 parolees—giving them only thirty more days of lawful status and associated work authorization. The federal government seeks a stay of a district court order temporarily pausing that termination, which would immediately throw into chaos the lives of half a million people and those connected to them. Termination of parole would render participants vulnerable to deportation to countries wracked by poverty, violence, and horrific oppression by authoritarian socialist governments. A central element of the government’s position is the claim that the CHNV program was illegal. Our brief demonstrates that claim is badly mistaken.
In Part I, we show that broad, categorical parole programs have deep historical roots. Since the Eisenhower Administration, the Government has implemented over 125 such categorical programs, involving thousands or even millions of parolees in a single year. Part II explains why the CHNV parole programs are consistent with the statutory requirement that parole be considered on a “case-by-case basis.”
In Part III, we demonstrate that migrants from the CHNV countries indeed have “urgent humanitarian reasons” to seek refuge in the United States. They are fleeing a combination of rampant violence, brutal oppression by authoritarian socialist regimes, and severe economic crises. We further show that paroling CHNV migrants also creates a “significant public benefit.” That benefit is reducing pressure and disorder on America’s southern border. The CHNV program massively reduced cross-border illegal migration by citizens of the nations it covers.
Finally, Part IV shows that, if the Court accepts the Government’s position on the legality of the CHNV program, it would also potentially imperil over 100,000 people who received parole under the Uniting for Ukraine program, for people fleeing Russia’ brutal invasion of that country. The latter relies on the same legal authority as the former.
This brief is based in part on an earlier amicus brief defending the legality of the CHNV program in Texas v. Department of Homeland Security, a lawsuit filed by twenty GOP-controlled states (that case was eventually dismissed by a conservative Trump-appointed federal judge for lack of standing). I also defended the legality of CHNV in a 2023 article in The Hill, and criticized Trump’s attempts to revoke in a March 2025 post at this site.
The Cato Institute and I are grateful to Grant Martinez, a partner at Yetter Coleman in Houston, TX, for his excellent work in helping adapt my arguments from the earlier brief to this case, at a time when I was extremely busy and could not do this task entirely on my won.
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