The US Supreme Court on Friday allowed Donald Trump's administration to strip legal protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. The justices issued an emergency order, which will last as long as the court case continues, putting on hold a lower-court ruling that found the administration had wrongly ended temporary protected status (TPS) for the Venezuelans. The three liberal justices dissented.
Trump's Republican administration has moved to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the US and work legally, including ending TPS for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection during the Biden presidency. TPS is granted in 18-month increments. In May, the Supreme Court reversed a preliminary order from Judge Edward Chen that affected another 350,000 Venezuelans whose protections expired in April.
Some migrants have lost their jobs and homes while others have been detained and deported after the justices stepped in the first time, lawyers for the migrants told the court. Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent: 'I view today's decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket... I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance.'
Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife or other dangerous conditions. Judge Chen had found that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acted 'with unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner… for the preordained purpose of expediting termination of Venezuela's TPS status'. An appellate panel unanimously agreed, stating DHS made its decisions first and searched for a valid basis second.
