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    Move to Canada? Migrants Face ‘No Good Options’ After Supreme Court Ruling.

    Migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who entered the United States legally under a Biden-era program are now scrambling.On weekend mornings, the La Boulangerie Bakery in East Orange, N.J., is normally bustling with customers who come for its Haitian baked goods, cookies and coconut sweets.It was empty on Saturday, a day after a Supreme Court ruling made many Haitians and other immigrants who came to the United States legally vulnerable to deportation.“Look around,” said the owner, Rosemond Clerval, 50. “People are afraid.”The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke temporary legal status from immigrants who qualified for humanitarian parole under a program that began in 2022 and 2023 under the Biden administration. It allowed certain immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to come to the United States and stay for up to two years.Now, tens of thousands of immigrants who only recently fled instability in their home countries and thought they had found a temporary legal refuge in the United States are facing a daunting, new dilemma.Where to go from here?Some were making plans to move to Canada, rather than face being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Jeffrey Thielman, the president of the International Institute of New England, which works with refugees and immigrants in the Boston area and beyond.“They’re trying to figure out where else they can go,” Mr. Thielman said. “The bottom line is that these folks can’t go back to Haiti.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Blow to Biden-era Program Plunges Migrants Into Further Uncertainty

    A Supreme Court ruling on Friday ended temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of people. But it is unclear how quickly many could be deported.For thousands of migrants from some of the world’s most unstable countries, the last several months in United States have felt like a life-or-death legal roller coaster.And after a Supreme Court ruling on Friday in favor of a key piece of the Trump administration’s deportation effort, hundreds of thousands of migrants found themselves plunged once again into a well of uncertainty. They face the prospect that after being granted temporary permission to live in the United States, they will now be abruptly expelled and perhaps sent back to their perilous homelands.“One court said one thing, another court said another, and that just leaves us all very confused and worried,” said Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian who lives with his partner and their toddler in Ohio.Immigration lawyers reported that they had been fielding calls from families asking whether they should continue to go to work or school. Their clients, they say, were given permission to live and work temporarily in the United States.Now, with that permission revoked while legal challenges work their way through lower courts, many immigrants fear that any encounter with the police or other government agencies could lead to deportation, according to lawyers and community leaders.“Sometimes I have thought of going to Canada, but I don’t have family there to receive me,” said Frantzdy Jerome, who came to the United States from Haiti and lives in Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How ICE Is Seeking to Ramp Up Deportations Through Courthouse Arrests

    Officials had largely steered clear of arrests at immigration courts out of concern that they would deter people from showing up for hearings.A hearing on Tuesday at immigration court in Van Nuys, Calif., was supposed to be routine for a young family from Colombia, the first step in what they hoped would be a successful bid for asylum.To their surprise, the judge informed the father, Andres Roballo, that the government wished to dismiss his deportation case. Taken aback, Mr. Roballo hesitated, then responded: “As long as I stay with my family.”Moments later, as they exited the courtroom into a waiting area, Mr. Roballo was encircled by plainclothes federal agents who ushered him into a side room. Other agents guided his shaken wife, Luisa Bernal, and their toddler toward the elevator.Outside the courthouse, Ms. Bernal collapsed on a bench. “They have him, they have him,” she wailed. “We didn’t understand this would happen.”Mr. Roballo’s arrest was part of an aggressive new initiative by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at immigration courts, the latest escalation by the Trump administration in its all-out effort to ramp up deportations.Agents have begun arresting migrants immediately after their hearings if they have been ordered deported or their cases have been dismissed, a move that enables their swift removal, according to immigration lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program

    The Trump administration had asked the court to allow it to end deportation protections for more than 500,000 people facing dire humanitarian crises in their home countries.The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    JD Vance’s Campaign Plane Is Being Used for Migrant Deportation Flights

    The Boeing 737 has been chartered more than a dozen times this year by the federal government to deport migrants to several countries in Central America.In its former life, the charter plane with the tail No. N917XA went by the moniker Trump Force Two.The ubiquitous red, white and blue livery logged thousands of miles last year as the campaign plane of JD Vance, who was elected as President Trump’s vice president in November.But that plane — the same one the campaign offered rides on to entice donors to give money — is now carrying out a much different and clandestine kind of task for the Trump administration.The Boeing 737 has been chartered more than a dozen times this year by the federal government to deport migrants to several Central American countries, according to public aviation logs and a group that tracks the flights.The Trump-Vance campaign rode to victory in part on its vow to undertake the largest deportation push in American history. The Trump administration has since expanded the range of people who can be targeted for removal, sped up the deportation process for others and, in some cases, tightened the rules for legal immigrants.In 2018, during President Trump’s first term, the plane was used for at least three deportation flights that took about 360 migrants to El Salvador and Guatemala, according to the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington. The center obtained the data through a public records request.A fourth flight, chartered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of what is known as its ICE Air program, was used to transfer about 144 migrants between detention centers in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Chinese Students Rattled by Trump Plan to ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas

    Students said the latest move had upended their plans and intensified their fears.It had been all figured out, Cici Wang said. Summer at home in China, then back to get her master’s degree in Chicago. After that, if she was lucky, a job in the United States.Now all of that is up in the air, she said, a potential casualty of a crackdown that has upended the future for more than 277,000 Chinese nationals studying in this country.“Hopefully, I’ll be fine,” said Ms. Wang, a 22-year-old aspiring computer scientist, sitting with her parents in the stately main quad of the University of Chicago on Thursday. “But I’m not sure.”Across the country, Chinese students reeled Thursday from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement that the Trump administration would begin “aggressively” revoking visas for Chinese students studying in the United States. More than two dozen students studying in the United States, most of whom did not want their names published for fear of retaliation, told The New York Times that they worried they could lose their academic opportunities in an instant, with little explanation.In a statement late Wednesday, the State Department announced it was focusing on those who were studying in “critical fields” or who had ties to the Chinese Communist Party and was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.The vague parameters had a chilling effect on Thursday as students wondered how broadly the Trump administration would apply its new criteria. Mr. Rubio did not define “critical fields,” but science students felt particularly vulnerable because American officials have expressed concerns about the recruiting of U.S.-trained scientists by China. Nor was it clear how American officials would determine which students had ties to the Communist Party.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Judge Blocks Shutdown of Biden-Era Migrant Entry Programs

    The sweeping order applied to hundreds of thousands of people legally in the country through programs put in place for Ukrainians, Afghans and others.A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from pulling legal protections from hundreds of thousands of people who entered the United States through Biden-era programs, ordering the government to restart processing applications for migrants who are renewing their status.In a sweeping order that extended to Ukrainians and Afghans, as well as military members and their relatives, the judge, Indira Talwani of Federal District Court in Massachusetts, wrote that the Trump administration’s categorical termination of legal pathways for those groups was probably unlawful and had the potential to sow discord across the country.The decision is a major victory for civil and immigrant rights groups that had sued to stop the administration amid a wider campaign by President Trump to strip legal status from a variety of groups living, working and studying in the country on a temporary basis.Judge Talwani wrote that the overarching campaign to strip the protections from those who had already been granted them represented a major escalation by the Trump administration that would cause chaos once the programs were wound down.In April, she had issued a similar order that applied more narrowly to hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with temporary legal status through another program. The government is seeking a reversal of that decision before the Supreme Court.“This court emphasizes, as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families,” Judge Talwani wrote. “Nor is it in the public interest for individuals who enlisted and are currently serving in the United States military to face family separation, particularly where some of these individuals joined the military in part to help their loved ones obtain lawful status.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Leader of Smuggling Ring Gets 10 Years After Indian Family Froze to Death

    The family of four that used the network got disoriented and lost their way in 2022 while trying to reach the United States from Canada on foot in blizzard conditions.More than three years after a young Indian family froze to death trying to cross into the United States from Canada during a blizzard, a federal judge on Wednesday sentenced the convicted architect of the human smuggling network that they used to a decade in prison.Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, a 29-year-old Indian national who lived in Florida, was sentenced to 10 years and one month in prison for his role in the operation that ferried Indians into the United States via Canada. He will be deported after serving time, the Justice Department said.His convicted co-conspirator, Steve Anthony Shand, 50, a U.S. citizen from Florida, was sentenced to six years and six months in prison followed by two years of supervised release.Prosecutors said during the trial that the men were part of a large-scale criminal operation that arranged for dozens of Indians to enter Canada on fake student visas, and then smuggled them into the United States over land.Mr. Patel orchestrated the logistics with other co-conspirators. Mr. Shand was the driver who met the immigrants south of the Canadian border and transported them to Chicago, according to the Justice Department. It said in a news release that the smugglers had charged $100,000 for passage from India to the United States.Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, left, and Steve Anthony Shand were sentenced on Wednesday.Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Associated PressFor Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishali, 37, and their 11-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son, the journey in January 2022 ended in tragedy. Royal Canadian Mounted Police found their ice-encased bodies in the desolate borderland between Manitoba and Minnesota.The Patels were part of a group of 11 Indians who had set out from the tiny Canadian town of Emerson with instructions on how to cross the border on foot.They expected to meet on the American side a person who would deliver them to their destination, most likely Illinois, where they had family or friends. But the family was separated from the rest of the group and most likely struggled to stay on course in the dark, buffeted by winds that whipped up blinding snow.The wind chill temperature was minus 36 degrees and lower, and wind gusts were as high as 50 miles per hour during their trek, the Justice Department said. An autopsy determined that the family had died from exposure to the cold. The seven other passengers survived.The investigation was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a specialized unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.“The callous disregard for life that led to the tragic deaths of an entire family will not be forgotten,” Jamie Holt, the special agent in charge in St. Paul, Minn., said in a statement on Wednesday.The sentencing took place in the northwestern Minnesota town of Fergus Falls, where a jury convicted the two men last fall of four counts each related to human smuggling, including causing serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy. More