Trump revokes legal status of 5.3L from four Latin American nations

US President Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 5,30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration.

The move, effective April 24, cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the migrants under former President Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.

Trump, a Republican, took steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office, including a push to expedite deportation of a record numbers of migrants in the US illegally. He has argued that the legal entry parole programmes launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law and called for their termination in a January 20 executive order.

Trump said on March 6 that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 2,40,000 Ukrainians who fled to the US during the conflict with Russia. Trump’s remarks came in response to a media report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.

Biden launched a parole entry programme for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration.