What A Day - Migrants’ Legal Limbo

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

In the last few weeks, the Supreme Court has dealt more than half a million migrants a serious blow to their ability to live here in the U.S. legally. In separate orders, the court allowed the Trump administration to lift deportation protections for Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians living here under two programs — humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status. While the court’s orders are only temporary, it’s little comfort to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now newly vulnerable to deportation. Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, explains what happens next.And in headlines: Federal authorities charged a man suspected of an antisemitic attack in Colorado with a federal hate crime, the Supreme Court declined to hear two gun rights cases, and representatives for Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul for peace talks.Show Notes:Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Tuesday, June 3rd. I'm Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that is very excited to see the new briefings National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has been tasked with creating for President Donald Trump to make it more fun and interesting for him. Would puppets help? I think so. On today's show, the Supreme Court says no thanks to hearing two big gun cases, and authorities charged a man suspected of an anti-Semitic attack in Boulder, Colorado with a federal hate crime. But let's start with immigration. Because in the last two weeks, the Supreme Court has dealt two huge blows to around half

a million migrants living here, legally. On Friday, the court said the Trump administration could end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of folks from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. They were here under a Biden-era expansion of a program called humanitarian parole. It allowed people from those countries to enter the U.S. legally so long as they met certain requirements, but it isn't a path to citizenship. Friday's decision followed another court order from two weeks ago. That one applied specifically to Venezuelans here under a different but similar program known as Temporary Protected Status or TPS. Congress created the program in the 90s, and the TLDR version of it is,

it allows migrants from certain countries who are already in the US to stay and work here because the government believes conditions in their country of origin are unsafe, maybe because of a natural disaster or a war, but it's also not a path to citizenship. Of course, Donald Trump hates protected status designations and has made ending them a key part of his shove immigrants out the door agenda since day one. Literally. He signed an executive order on inauguration day directing the Department of Homeland Security to limit the use of both humanitarian parole and TPS. It's all very confusing. Immigration law notoriously is and it's also important to remember two things.

Immigration law notoriously is. And it's also important to remember two things. One, in both cases, the Supreme Court's orders are only temporary. The justices just lifted deportation protections while the cases play out in lower courts. And two, that's undoubtedly cold comfort for the hundreds of thousands of people whose legal status keeps switching on and off at what must feel like the collective whims of an executive branch largely run by xenophobic maniacs and a judiciary branch doing its very best. So now what? I had to talk to someone who knows pretty much everything there is to know about immigration policy, so I called up Dara Lind.

She's a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and spent years covering the topic as a reporter. Dara, welcome back to What A Day. Thank you. I feel like people like me need a better default, then it's great to be back on because I'm never on for anything good. Well, once again, you're not on for anything good. But to start out, can you talk about the two programs that the Supreme Court has now gutted?

One was temporary protected status specifically for Venezuelans. The other was what's called humanitarian parole, which also covered Venezuelans along with people from Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. What had the government promised to these people? So both of these are kind of under the broad umbrella of this isn't an official visa that like Congress has said can be given out. This is a discretionary form of protection from deportation. But there are different things. There is a law saying that when the executive branch decides that it would be unsafe for people to be returned to a country because of natural disaster, because of civil war, something like that,

that the government can grant temporary protected status to people from that country. So the Biden administration had done this. It had said in 2023, we are keeping temporary protected status for Venezuela and if you showed up in the last two years, you can apply for it and start getting protected. The people who had applied for the first time in 2023 are the people who the Supreme Court said, actually, the Trump administration can just take that back. Okay. So then there's humanitarian parole, which is another thing the executive branch gets to give as a protection from deportation. The Biden administration said, we're going to allow people who are not in the US from these four countries, from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, to apply to come here legally for

two years and work legally under the protection of humanitarian parole. And so this program, which became known as CHNV, was under legal challenge. The Trump administration came in and said, if your two years of protection had not already expired, as of the end of March, it's expired, goodbye, you're gone. And then there's been a lawsuit over that. And so the Supreme Court then on Friday allowed for this mass termination of protections under the CHNV program. So for people from Venezuela, was there significant overlap in these programs?

Oh yeah, absolutely. So those people have now gotten the rug yanked out from under them twice in the last two weeks. So hundreds of thousands of people have, in the span of literally two weeks, had their temporary legal status revoked, albeit temporarily, while various court cases play out. This is confusing for me, and I am not one of the people subject to any of this. So this could take years. What happens now for these folks? So this is, of course, one of the big fights between this administration and the courts, This is, of course, one of the big fights between this administration and the courts, which is when can a lower court judge say, you have to stop doing this while we figure

out whether it was legal to do? So what the Supreme Court has done is kind of give a couple of big wins to the administration in that fight in saying, we're not taking a stance on the legality of it, although we think you can go forward with acting as if it is. And then at the end of the day, there can be a largely academic decision about whether it was legal to do this or not. So yeah, in the meantime, there is, however, a real question about timelines, not because the court case is still ongoing, but because when you have a deadline and then a court says that deadline cannot be enforced, and

then the date that would have been the deadline passes, and then another court says, well, that shouldn't have happened to begin with, is the deadline in effect or not? The clearest way to clear this up would be for the government to say, we are going to consider every grant of protection to be no longer valid. They haven't said that yet. There's actually a literal page on a government website where they note that they have a victory in the court case, but don't bother to spell out what that means for the people who are currently affected.

It's like, are their work permits still valid or not? What does it mean for, you know, people who might be like renting to them as landlords? There are so many issues with just letting people go by day to day, not knowing if they have legal status or not. It really is striking that we're now at two weeks after the TPS decision, and there hasn't been any public face and clarity on that. And just to be clear, to like back up a little bit, two weeks after the TPS decision and there hasn't been any public-facing clarity on that. And just to be clear, to like back up a little bit, all of these people are here in the United

States legally. They have probably gotten jobs and they live in apartments with landlords. And that also means the government has tons of data on them, just as the Trump administration is putting pressure on agents to arrest more people. Could that information be weaponized against them? It's a really, really good question. There's nothing necessarily saying it can't. There are questions about whether that's the most useful way to go about things like, yeah,

an administration that, for example, has told another group of people that it tried to strip of parole, it like just sent mass emails, and those mass emails sometimes went to their lawyers, sometimes went to email addresses that their lawyers had never given the government, sometimes went to totally random people. They don't appear to be as, let's say, compelled by data hygiene as we would expect. It is, however, generally true that these are people who are not used to living as if

they can be apprehended by immigration enforcement because as far as you ask them, they came legally. They are going through everything the right way. And so the ability to just pick them up because it's easier to find someone who isn't trying to hide is a very real consideration over and above, you know, the kind of logic of in order to deport people who are in the US without status, we're making more people deportable, which is really what we have. They've de-documented more people than they've deported. We've also seen immigration officials trying to target people at immigration court or at

routine check-ins Which is a big break from how things were done before because I think if there was a sense of not wanting to deter people From trying to follow the law. So what kind of bind does that put people in who are just trying to stay here? So like the check-in thing is absolutely a big bind That is something we saw under the first Trump administration something because it's just really easy to deport people Who already have to show up for appointments with ICE and just say, well, you came in for your check-in, we've decided we're detaining you now. The immigration court thing is a whole other level, because not only does it mean that,

as with an ICE check-in, if you don't show up, then you can be ordered deported in absentia, and now you have a deportation order to your name. You can't try to reenter the US legally for a certain amount of time. But the other thing with the immigration courthouse arrests that I don't think is getting enough attention is that this is happening as they're trying to terminate these people's cases in immigration court. For people who have been in the US for less than two years, even if they have active immigration

court cases, the government has the power to say, even if they have active immigration court cases, the government has the power to say, we're going to ask the judge to terminate this immigration court case. And if the judge says yes, we are instead going to put you in expedited removal proceedings where we don't have to give you a hearing. So what does that mean? Is that like, you know, what we've seen with some of these deportation flights, like one day you're here, the next day you're just gone? The best protection that immigrants in the US have, and this has been true since inauguration day, has not been the law, it's been the logistics. They still haven't increased detention to the level where they could really take in a whole lot of people at once. And they aren't shoving people

out, they aren't deporting people quickly enough that they can move a whole lot of people through the system. So that means that some of the people who are being detained still will get released while they're going through proceedings. I think that the shoe that hasn't dropped yet that I am really waiting for is that in the reconciliation package, there is an enormous expansion of money for ICE, specifically for detention. That's been such a limiting factor that that would allow them to fix a lot of the other logistical issues. So I can't really tell from here how much of the current frustrations they're dealing

with are frustrations that would happen no matter how big a check Congress wrote them and how much they're just kind of biding their time until Donald Trump can sign a bill that gives ICE multiple times more money than it's ever had before for the purposes of deporting as many people as possible. Dara, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. That was my conversation with Dara Lind, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council. We'll link to her work in our show notes.

We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day is brought to you by OneSkin. As the weather warms up, you might want to rethink your skincare routine, especially if you're using retinol, which can leave your skin more vulnerable to sun damage. In lab studies, OS1 face boosted collagen production similar to retinol, but without that sun sensitivity risk.

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That's 15% off at Oneskin.co with code WOD. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Give your skin the scientifically proven gentle care it deserves with one skin. Here's what else we're following today. He said he wanted them all to die. He had no regrets and he would go back and do it again. Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado J. Bishop Gruhl said Monday the man accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at people attending a march in Boulder, Colorado, has been charged with a federal hate crime. According to an FBI affidavit, a group called Run for Their Lives hosted the walk on Sunday to call attention to Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. According to the affidavit, the man yelled,

free Palestine during the attack, in which at least 12 people were hurt. Gruel said the suspect had been planning his attack for a year. And he acted because he hated what he called the Zionist group. But what the charges allege that he did was to throw Molotov cocktails at a group of men and women, some of them in their late 80s, burning them as they peacefully walked on a Sunday. The Department of Homeland Security says the man is an Egyptian national whose visa expired in 2023.

He's also facing state charges, including attempted murder. The Supreme Court Monday rejected two gun rights cases. One involved Rhode Island's restrictions on high capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The other case centers around Maryland's ban on assault rifles and semi-automatic rifles like AR-15s. Lower courts rejected arguments

that the state laws violated the Second Amendment. The majority didn't explain why they declined to hear the cases. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the decision. Thomas wrote that the court should have taken up the Maryland case in particular because of its implications for the millions of Americans who own AR-15s, which is considered the most popular rifle in the U.S. Conservative Justice Brett

Kavanaugh said Monday that he agreed with the decision to reject the cases for now, but he noted that he thinks the high court will weigh in on the constitutionality of assault weapons bans, quote, in the next term or two. President Trump said Monday that the U.S. will not allow Iran to enrich uranium under a new nuclear deal, despite reports that his administration is open to it. He made the statement in a post on True Social because of course he did. The U.S. submitted a nuclear deal proposal to Iran that would allow the country to enrich uranium at a low level on its own soil. According to Axios, Trump's Middle Eastern envoy Steve Witkoff sent the offer to Iran on Saturday.

This proposal would be a significant departure from what the White House has publicly said about its demands. Trump officials have maintained that the U.S. will not allow Iran to enrich uranium at all and that the country must dismantle all of its nuclear facilities to make a deal. Iran has said it will not agree to either of these conditions. Iran is reportedly set to reject the deal. An Iranian senior diplomat told the outlet that the proposal was a quote, non-starter

and that it does not clearly address Iran's firm demand that the US lift its sanctions on the country. The news seems to confirm that the US and Iran are still very far apart on a deal after five rounds of talks. Another round is expected to be scheduled soon. Representatives for Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul on Monday for peace talks, just a day after the two countries traded harrowing attacks on one another. The two sides met briefly at the negotiating table and left with an agreement to exchange dead soldiers and capture prisoners of war. Ukraine's

defense minister, Rustam Umarov, detailed the swap. We agreed to exchange all for all, seriously wounded and seriously sick prisoners of war. Second category is young soldiers who are from 18 to 25 years old, all for all. Also, we agreed to return 6,000 to 6,000 bodies of fallen soldiers. But not much else was settled. Officials said the Russian delegation provided a memorandum that outlined its terms for peace. Umarov says Kiev needs a week to look it over. Russian state news agencies published the document's demands after the talks ended.

They include requiring Ukraine to set limits to the size of its army, give up its bid to join NATO, and acknowledge Russia's territorial gains. All things Ukraine has already said it would not do. Umarov said he hoped Russia and Ukraine could meet again before the end of the month. And that's the news. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the fact that the new director of FEMA didn't know the United States has a hurricane season, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, not just about how yes, really. Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson told staffers at the agency he didn't know

hurricane season, which began June 1st, was a thing in the US. Like me. What a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Coaston, um there are two possibilities here. Either this is one of the worst attempts at a joke ever or um we're screwed. What Today is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Foer. Our producer is Michelle Alloy.

We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Foer. Our producer is Michelle Eloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Giliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.