WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — The US said Friday it was terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, giving them weeks to leave the country.

President Donald Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations.

The order affects around 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came to the US under a scheme launched in October 2022 by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden and expanded in January the following year.

They will lose their legal protection 30 days after the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) order is published in the Federal Register, which is scheduled Tuesday.

That means immigrants sponsored by the program “must depart the United States” by 24 April unless they have secured another immigration status allowing them to remain in the country, the order says.

Welcome.US, which supports people seeking refuge in the US, urged those affected by the move to “immediately” seek advice from an immigration lawyer.

The Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans program, announced in January 2023, allowed entry to the US for two years for up to 30,000 migrants per month from the four countries, which have grim human rights records.

Biden touted the plan as a “safe and humane” way to ease pressure on the crowded US-Mexico border.

But the DHS stressed Friday that the scheme was “temporary.”

“Parole is inherently temporary, and parole alone is not an underlying basis for obtaining any immigration status, nor does it constitute an admission to the United States,” it said in the order.

Trump last week invoked rare wartime legislation to fly more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador, which has offered to imprison migrants and even US citizens at a discount.

Mega-jail

Lawyers and relatives of Venezuelans flown from the US to a notorious jail in El Salvador believe the men were wrongly labeled gang members and terrorists because of their tattoos.

Jhon Chacin, a professional tattoo artist, has images of “a flower, a watch, an owl, skulls” and family members’ names etched onto his skin.

Last October, the 35-year-old was arrested at the Mexican border for entering the US illegally.

Then last weekend, after not hearing from him for several days, shocked family members spotted him in a video of shaved and chained prisoners at a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

He was one of 238 men declared as a member of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua ­— a terrorist group under US law — and deported by US President Donald Trump.

“He doesn’t have a criminal record, he’d never been arrested,” Chacin’s sister Yuliana, who lives in Texas, told Agence France-Presse.

She is convinced her brother was designated a gang member because of his body art.

At the US detention center, before being deported, “ICE (immigration) agents told him he belonged to a criminal gang because he had a lot of tattoos.”