Si desea leer este artículo en español visite El Planeta.
Three immigrant plaintiffs and the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts are suing the Trump administration in federal court over its cancellation of a parole program.
Democracy Forward and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute filed the suit in the District of Massachusetts on Monday, challenging the end of the CBP One app, a online appointment system and subsequent parole program for people seeking to legally immigrate to the United States.
The complaint states that the government’s decision to end CBP One earlier this year resulted in immigrants ”living in the United States legally to being deemed 'illegal aliens’ overnight.“ Immigrants who came in through that app system lost legal status and are technically undocumented. The suit seeks to reverse that decision for parolees already in the United States, restoring the parole they had been granted.
“We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs, their homes, and their access to food, health care, and they even now face the threat of detention or deportation back to dangerous conditions,” said Ciro Valiente, spokesperson for Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts.
Plaintiffs said the decision by the Trump administration is a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, and that the government can only end parole early on a case-by-case basis, not en masse like what happened with the CBP One cancellation.
Launched in 2020, the CBP One program was initially for commercial trucking companies to schedule cargo inspections. The app was expanded in 2023 to allow migrants to schedule appointments at ports of entry on the southern border. Immigrants seeking entry without appointments would typically be turned away. Over two years, nearly a million people scheduled appointments.
The three individual plaintiffs include a Haitian woman living in Massachusetts and the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, which said it has at least 473 parolees in Massachusetts, and nearly 5,000 in its organization nationwide. The other plaintiffs are a Cuban woman living in Texas and a woman living in Ohio, originally from Venezuela. The plaintiffs are seeking class certification so the court’s decision would apply nationwide.
The Massachusetts individual plaintiff, anonymized as “Olivia Doe,” is a Haitian who arrived through the app, and had a border patrol inspection before being allowed into the U.S. Her parole was supposed to continue until Nov. 30, 2026, and she also has a pending asylum hearing for December 2027. Her work permit has been revoked, along with her legal status.
It is unclear how many other immigrants arrived in Massachusetts through the app-based program and are in the same situation. The thousands of people nationwide with the legal status received an April email from the Department of Homeland Security, which said: “It is time for you to leave the United States.” The email includes no reasoning for the termination of people’s status.
“They complied with all of the instructions. They’ve done everything that they were supposed to do,” said Heather Arroyo, senior immigration attorney at MLRI. “This was just arbitrarily stripped from them.”
