LOS ANGELES, CA – The Trump administration announced Monday that it intends to terminate humanitarian parole programs, including for individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, collectively known as the CHNV program.  

While details of the administration’s plan remain unclear, the legality of humanitarian parole is well-established. For more than 70 years, Republican and Democratic presidents have relied on it to allow non-citizens to temporarily enter the U.S. for humanitarian reasons or in the public interest. 

The Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) and its partners intervened on behalf of seven sponsors and successfully defended the CHNV program against a Texas-led challenge. In March 2024, a federal court ruled against the states. 

Please attribute the following quote to Monika Langarika, senior staff attorney at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. 

“For the last two years we have defended the CHNV parole program in court because we know that safe pathways to the United States save lives, offer people critical reprieve from untenable conditions abroad, and enrich U.S. communities. Indeed, Judge Tipton refused to strike CHNV because the states that sued to block it simply could not prove that they were harmed by it. The Trump administration’s decision to abruptly end CHNV will endanger the lives of vulnerable people, harm the interests of American sponsors across the nation, and undermine the United States’s rich history of exercising its parole authority to welcome newcomers in need. We are deeply troubled by this cruel and short-sighted action.” 

Please attribute the following quote to Ahilan Arulanantham, faculty co-director at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. 

“The CHNV program serves the function Congress intended for parole when it authorized programs like this one decades ago. It has allowed American sponsors to provide crucial humanitarian protection to people in need. The government has no legal obligation to end the CHNV program, and doing so will harm thousands of people both here and abroad."       

Read a brief history of immigration parole HERE.

About UCLA CILP:

Founded in 2020, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law expands the law school's role as a national leader in immigration law and policy, generating innovative ideas at the intersection of immigration scholarship and practice and serving as a hub for transforming those ideas into meaningful changes in immigration policy. 

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