The Supreme Court has paved the way for president Trump to potentially deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants who recently entered the United States under a two-year grant of parole. The decision came on Friday.

The justices, in response to two dissents, granted an emergency appeal and set aside rulings by judges in Boston who blocked Trump’s repeal of the parole policy that was initially adopted by the Biden administration.

That 2023 policy allowed cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to apply for entry and work authorization if they had a financial sponsor and passed background checks. By the time Biden left office, 530,000 peopel from those countries had entered the U.S. under the program.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the decision.

“The court plainly botched this,” Jackson wrote, also stating that the case should have been kept on hold during the appeals process.

Friday’s unsigned order isn’t a final ruling, but it strongly suggests that Trump’s order will be upheld.The majority likely wouldn’t have lifted the judge’s order if they believed her ruling was correct.

Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the decision as a victory for Americans.

“Ending the CHNV parole programs, as well as the paroles of those who exploited it, will be a necesary return to common-sense policies, a return to public safety, and a return to America first,” she said in a statement.

This marks the second time in two weeks that the justices have upheld Trump’s authority to revoke a large-scale Biden administration policy that provided temporary legal status to some migrants.

The first revoked program gave temporary protected status to around 350,000 Venezuelans who were in the contry and feared being sent home.

The parole policy allowed up to 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries to enter the country with temporary legal protection. Biden’s officials viewed it as a strategy to reduce illegal border crossings and offer a safe, legal pathway for carefully screened migrants.

The policy was based on a provision of immigration laws that allows the secretary of homeland Security to “parole into United States temporarily… on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons any alien” seeking admission.

Advocates for immigrants have expressed concern that the decision will devastate and unleash “widespread chaos” on the affected communities.

“The Supreme Court has effectively greenlit deportation orders for an estimated half a million people,the largest such de-legalization in the modern era,” said Karen tumlin,founder and director of Justice action Centre.

Upon taking office, Trump ordered an end to “all categorical parole programs.” In late March, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the parole protection would end in 30 days.

Though, last month, U.S. district Judge Indira Talwani blocked DHS’ “categorical” termination of the parole authority.She stated that the law allows the goverment to grant parole on a “case-by-case basis,” suggesting it must also be revoked on a case-by-case basis.

On May 5, the 1st Circuit Court agreed in a 3-0 decision that a “categorical termination” of parole appeared to be illegal.

Three days later, Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed another emergency appeal at the Supreme Court, arguing that the judge had overstepped her authority.

he wrote that the parole authority is “purely discretionary” in the hands of the DHS secretary, and the law prevents judges from reviewing those decisions.

While the Biden administration “granted parole categorically to aliens” from four countries, he said the Boston-based judges blocked the new policy as it is indeed “categorical.”

He accused the judges of “needlessly upending critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core Executive Branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”

Immigrants rights advocates had urged the court to stand aside.

They told the court that granting the administration’s appeal “would cause an immense amount of needless human suffering.”

They stated that the migrants “all came to the United States with the permission of the federal government after each individually applied through a U.S. financial sponsor, passed security and other checks while still abroad, and received permission to fly to an airport here at no expense to the government to request parole.”

“Some class members have been here for nearly two years; others just arrived in January,” they added.

In response, Sauer asserted that the migrants had no grounds to complain, stating they “accepted parole with full awareness that the benefit was temporary, discretionary, and revocable at any time.”

The Biden administration began offering temporary entry to Venezuelans in late 2022 and expanded the program a few months later to include people from the other three countries.

In October of last year, the Biden administration announced that it would not offer renewals of parole and directed those immigrants to apply for other forms of relief, such as asylum or temporary protected status.

The exact number of people who remained protected solely through the parole status and could now be targeted for deportation remains unclear, as does whether the administration would seek to deport many or most of these immigrants.

Parolees who recently tried to adjust thier legal status encountered obstacles.

In a Feb. 14 memo, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration services announced an administrative hold on all pending benefit requests filed by those under the parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, as well as a program for Ukrainians and another for family reunification.

The memo stated that the federal agency needed to implement “additional vetting flags” to identify fraud, public safety, or national security concerns. However, on Wednesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration