What have we gained by turning immigrants who came legally into undocumented immigrants?
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
What happened? The Supreme Court has ordered that the Trump administration can, for now, revoke the legal immigration status of 500,000 people who entered the U.S. through the CHNV humanitarian parole program. This program allowed Americans to financially sponsor folks from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to come to the United States. It was a legal program, and while the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the merits of the case yet, they have said the President is free to take the legal status away while other legal cases shake out.1 This means that 500,000 of our neighbors who came to the United States legally and who had Americans choose to sponsor them, will become undocumented by having their legal status taken away, and thus become eligible for deportation.2
Friends, the President campaigned on deporting violent criminals. Instead, in situation after situation, we’re seeing the administration seek to take legal status away, turning people undocumented, and then trying to deport them. We’re seeing ICE show up at courthouses where people are doing the right thing, showing up to court, only to have the government “drop their case” so they are eligible for deportation.3 Whether you voted for the President or not, this is almost certainly not the vision that you had for our country.
How can I pray? Pray for the 500,000+ people who are due to lose their legal status. If you know them, pray for them by name. Pray for their employers, as this will be a blow to the workforce. Pray for their children’s teachers and classmates. Pray for the American sponsors who have supported these folks as they have adjusted to the United States. Pray for the judges hearing complicated immigration cases. Pray that Secretary Noem and President Trump, that they would somehow come face-to-face with the human impact of these policy decisions, and be moved towards compassion.
What is one more thing I can do? If you know those affected by these CHNV changes, be intentional about reaching out to them for connection this week. (You know your relationship best, but your check-in doesn’t need to be immigration related. Just be a part of their community!) I also encourage you to call your representatives and ask them to urge the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to reconsider these policies. World Relief has a tool you can use. (It focuses on Afghan Christians, but is about all parolees, and you can change the language if you want!)
Need a pep talk about why calling your reps matters? Read this!
In some ways, this is not surprising, and it shows the limits of humanitarian parole. This kind of immigration pathway is supposed to be at the discretion of the President. Unfortunately, because Congress has been unwilling to pass meaningful immigration reform for decades, we’ve seen our leaders turn to less stable programs, such as humanitarian parole, whose protections can be reversed by future presidents. We see the same thing in President Obama’s use of DACA to protect Dreamers. A much better solution in both situations would be comprehensive immigration reform — where both parties work together to pass laws to actually update our immigration system!
I am not a lawyer!! And it is very likely that many of these folks have already applied for other forms of protection like asylum, or are looking at any possible alternative pathway to stay legally present in the U.S.