By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, March 31 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Tuesday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to reverse the termination of the legal status of thousands of migrants who had been allowed to temporarily live in the United States after using an appointment app utilized by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston ruled that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully in April 2025 when it sent mass emails notifying many of the more than 900,000 people who had entered the country using the CBP One app that it was “time for you to leave the United States.”
Skye Perryman, whose liberal legal group Democracy Forward pursued the legal challenge, in a statement hailed the ruling, saying the judge had rejected an effort to “erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button.”
A DHS spokesperson in a statement called the ruling “blatant judicial activism” that interfered with Trump’s authority to determine who remains in the United States.
“Canceling these paroles is a promise kept to the American people to secure our borders and protect our national security,” the DHS spokesperson said.
The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit filed in August by three people from Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti and the advocacy group Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, who argued the Trump administration’s action constituted an abrupt, unlawful move to strip immigrants of their parole status and work authorization.
Such immigrants had been generally granted two-year terms of humanitarian parole after using a Biden-era app called CBP One to schedule an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
DHS under Biden had begun requiring many asylum seekers to use that app starting in 2023 in an effort to alleviate chaos at the border.
Trump, shortly after returning to the White House in January 2025, moved to shut down use of the app, as the Republican president’s administration began to institute his hardline immigration and mass deportation agenda.
In April 2025, many non-citizens who received parole through the CBP One process received an email from DHS saying it was exercising its discretion to terminate their parole. “Please depart the United States immediately,” the email said.
Burroughs said that DHS failed when sending out those termination notices to comply with requirements that it provide a record showing an official had determined the purposes of parole have been served.
“Accordingly, the parole terminations exceeded the agency’s statutory authority and contradicted the procedures set forth in its own regulations,” wrote Burroughs, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Franklin Paul and Bill Berkrot)
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