The Supreme Court on Friday let President Donald Trump’s administration go ahead with ending temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. This reversed a lower-court decision that had blocked the policy and set up big effects for immigrant communities all over the country.
In a short emergency order, the justices agreed to the administration’s request to stop enforcing a federal judge’s decision that said the government did something wrong when it ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans.
Newsweek says that the ruling means that DHS can now take away protections that kept Venezuelan immigrants from being deported and let them work legally in the US.
Trump has said that TPS has been misused by previous administrations and gone beyond its original purpose as a short-term humanitarian measure. The Court’s decision is a big win for him. Congress set up the program in 1990. It lets the executive branch give safe haven to people from other countries who are fleeing natural disasters, wars, or other terrible situations.
The case is about Venezuelan citizens, but immigration advocates say the Court’s decision could set a precedent for other TPS-designated groups, such as Haitians, Hondurans, and Salvadorans. Advocacy groups say that thousands of people have already lost their jobs, homes, and stability in their communities since the policy change.
“This decision puts not only Venezuelan families at risk, but also the integrity of all humanitarian protections,” said Jorge Lowery of the National TPS Alliance. “We’re getting ready for a lot of trouble in immigrant communities all over the country.”
The Biden administration had originally extended TPS to Haitians and Venezuelans because of humanitarian reasons. Trump has long promised to undo those extensions, saying they are illegal increases in executive power.
Before, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen said 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.” The appellate panel, which was made up of all judges, also criticized the government’s actions, saying that DHS “made its decisions first and looked for a valid reason for those decisions second.”
The Supreme Court’s order stops those decisions and lets DHS carry out the terminations right away.
The order divided the justices along political lines. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, strongly disagreed with the majority, saying they had gone too far on the Court’s emergency docket.
Jackson wrote, “I see today’s decision as yet another serious misuse of our emergency docket.” “This Court should have stayed its hand.” The Court clearly misjudges the factors of irreparable harm and balance of the equities by putting the bare claim of unlimited executive power ahead of the pleas of countless families for the stability that our Government has promised them.
“I disagree because I cannot accept our repeated, unnecessary, and harmful interference with cases that are still going on in the lower courts while lives are at stake,” she said.
The order only applies to Venezuelans and not Haitians, who were also involved in the original lawsuit. Now that the ruling is in place, DHS can start the process of removing Venezuelans whose TPS status has run out.
Teresa Amaya, an immigration lawyer in Portland, said on Friday that the decision will confuse her clients. “People don’t know if they should pack up their lives, if their work permits are still good, or if ICE could come knocking next week,” she said.
Trump, who made enforcing the border a key part of his presidency, has framed the rollback as part of a larger effort to regain control over immigration. His administration has also told people to look over other humanitarian programs that he says have been misused.
Immigrant rights groups, on the other hand, promised to keep fighting their case in the lower courts even though they lost on Friday.
Lowery said, “We’re not giving up.” “These families need stability, not whiplash from every change in government.”
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