Egypt Daily News – The Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to cancel the legal status of half a million immigrants amid warnings about the impact on them.
In a separate move as part of its crackdown on immigration, the Trump administration ordered additional scrutiny of visa applications related to Harvard University.
The United States Supreme Court on Friday May 30, 2025 allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to cancel the legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Latin America, according to a judicial document.
The Trump administration had announced in March 2025 that it was in the process of ending the legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, who had been granted status under a program initiated by his predecessor Joe Biden.
The court’s decision was unsigned and did not provide reasoning, but it was accompanied by opposition from Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, who warned of “devastating consequences” from uprooting “the lives of nearly half a million non-citizens while their legal claims are still under consideration.”
About one million immigrants at risk of deportation
The ruling cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s administration to strip hundreds of thousands of immigrants of temporary legal protections, raising the total number of people who could face deportation to around one million.
The justices overturned a lower court’s order that had maintained temporary legal protections for over 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The court also allowed the administration to cancel temporary legal status for approximately 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in a separate case.
Trump had promised during his election campaign to deport millions and sought to dismantle former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies that provided lawful pathways for immigrants to reside in the U.S.
Additional scrutiny for Harvard visa applications
Separately, an internal document seen by Reuters on Friday revealed that the U.S. State Department had ordered all of its consular posts abroad to begin conducting extra scrutiny of visa applicants intending to travel to Harvard University for any purpose, in a significant escalation of President Trump’s crackdown on the academic institution.
In a cable dated May 30, 2025, sent to all U.S. diplomatic and consular missions, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed the immediate initiation of “additional vetting for any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose.”
The document stated that these applicants include, but are not limited to, prospective students, current students, faculty members, staff, contractors, guest speakers, and tourists. It cited the Department of Homeland Security as saying that Harvard University “failed to maintain a campus free of violence and antisemitism.” Therefore, the enhanced vetting measures are meant to help consular staff identify visa applicants “with a history of harassment or antisemitic violence.”
The order also instructs consular staff to question an applicant’s credibility if their social media accounts are private and to request that they change their settings to public. The State Department has not yet responded to a request for comment.
This move comes as part of the Trump administration’s intensified immigration crackdown and follows an earlier directive from Rubio to halt scheduling new student visa appointments. Rubio stated earlier this week that Washington would begin revoking visas for Chinese students at U.S. universities who are affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party and are studying in sensitive fields.
The Trump administration has launched a multi-pronged attack on the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status among other measures.
