The Trump administration must reverse course, according to Burroughs’s opinion.
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group filed a class-action lawsuit in August challenging the Trump administration’s blanket move to cancel parole for migrants who used the Biden-era online appointment system.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Boston on behalf of a Haitian woman living in Massachusetts, a woman from Cuba living in Texas, and a woman from Venezuela living in Ohio. The Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts also was listed as a plaintiff.
“Today’s ruling is a clear rejection of an administration that has tried to erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button,” Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said in a statement Tuesday.
“Our clients followed the law: They waited, registered, were inspected, and were granted parole under the law,” Perryman said. “The Trump-Vance administration’s effort to tear that status away overnight was unlawful and cruel — and today, the court rejected that harmful and destabilizing policy.”
According to the suit, each of the women made appointments to be inspected by Border Patrol at the US-Mexico border in Texas through the CBP One app. They were granted parole to enter the country but saw their status abruptly terminated in an April 18 mass email from the Department of Homeland Security. They asked the court to reverse the terminations.
The app was introduced in 2023 by the Biden administration to organize the crush of arrivals at the Mexico border. Trump promptly shut down the app on the first day of his second term.
The app was a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s strategy to create and expand legal pathways to enter the United States and to discourage illegal border crossings. By year’s end in 2024, 936,500 people had been allowed to enter with CBP One appointments at border crossings with Mexico.
Burroughs’s opinion said CBP does not have “unfettered discretion to terminate parole.”
“The termination of parole” is “an event that follows automatically from the decision that parole is no longer warranted,” Burroughs wrote.
Parole protects from deportation and is generally granted to people fleeing war or natural disaster.
“The agency must conclude that parole’s humanitarian or public-benefit purposes have been served before revoking it,” the opinion said.
Messages sent to the Department of Homeland Security were not immediately returned Tuesday.
Burroughs’s ruling applies to migrants who used the app between May 16, 2023 and Jan. 19, 2025, and were notified by email in April that they had to leave, but remained.
Tens of thousands of the migrants who received the notification have already left the country or been deported, the ruling said.
“It is time for you to leave the United States,” the DHS email read. It gave recipients seven days to leave the country, and warned that for those who tried to stay, “the federal government will find you.”
The email gave no basis for the revocations other than the agency’s discretionary authority, Burroughs’s opinion said.
Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.