Supreme Court lets Trump strip protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President 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 by U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco that found the administration had wrongly ended temporary protected status 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 United States and work legally, including ending TPS for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection under President Joe Biden, a Democrat. TPS is granted in 18-month increments.

In May, the Supreme Court reversed a preliminary order from Chen that affected another 350,000 Venezuelans whose protections expired in April. The high court provided no explanation at the time, which is common in emergency appeals.

“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the court wrote Friday in an unsigned order.

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.

“I view today's decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote. “Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent.”

Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife or other dangerous conditions. The designation can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary.

Chen found that the Department of Homeland Security acted “with unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner … for the preordained purpose of expediting termination of Venezuela’s TPS” status.

In earlier denying the Trump administration’s emergency appeal, Judge Kim Wardlaw wrote for a unanimous three-judge appellate panel that Chen determined that DHS made its “decisions first and searched for a valid basis for those decisions second.”

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, had argued in the new court filing that the justices’ May order should also apply to the current case.

“This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket,” Sauer wrote.

The result, he said, is that the “new order, just like the old one, halted the vacatur and termination of TPS affecting over 300,000 aliens based on meritless legal theories.”

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