The Supreme Court on Friday gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to scrap temporary deportation protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.
In their latest emergency order, the justices on the high court paused Obama-appointed District Judge Edward Chen’s September ruling that the Trump administration wrongly terminated an 18-month extension of temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants from Venezuela.
Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson opposed the majority in the unsigned order.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the court wrote.
“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the opinion continued, referring to an earlier ruling from the high court that lifted a March stay Chen had issued in the case.
Since the 1990s, the TPS program has granted humanitarian relief to the migrants from several disaster-plagued countries.
The federal program allows migrants to enjoy temporary legal status in the US and obtain work permits.
The Trump administration has sought to withdraw various legal protections for migrants from several nations granted under former President Joe Biden.
In her dissent, Jackson argued that “TPS statute plainly states” the designation for Venezuelan migrants shall remain effective until the expiration of its ‘most recent previous extension,’” which, before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated the extension, would have been October 2026.
“By now, our lower court colleagues have determined five times over that this abrupt truncation of the TPS period was unlawful or likely so,” Jackson argued. “They have done so in reasoned and thoughtful written opinions — opinions that, in the normal course, we would get to parse, assess, and embrace or reject, while fully explaining our reasoning.”
Jackson also argued that as litigation over Noem’s move to scrap TPS for Venezuelans plays out, lower courts went with the “obvious — i.e., least disruptive and most humane” option, in deciding to allow the migrants to keep their legal protections for the time being – which the Supreme Court has overturned.
“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” she added. “This Court should have stayed its hand.”
“Having opted instead to join the fray, the Court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.”
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called the Trump administration’s Supreme Court victory “a win for the American people and commonsense.”
“The American people should not have had to go to the Supreme Court twice to see justice done,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary. Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program.”
She added: “Meanwhile, the Biden administration allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens into our country exacerbating the issue and endangering all Americans. Now, that it’s clear the law and the American people are on our side, Secretary Noem will continue to use every tool at our disposal to prioritize the safety of all U.S. citizens.”
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