The United States Supreme Court has again cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s administration to revoke a temporary legal protection for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the United States.
On Friday, the court’s conservative majority granted the administration’s request to put on hold a judge’s ruling that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to end the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, granted to the migrants under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden while litigation proceeds.
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The Supreme Court previously sided with the administration in May to lift a temporary order that San Francisco-based District Judge Edward Chen issued at an earlier stage of the case.
“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the conservative majority 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.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented from Friday’s decision.
“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.”
Chen’s May ruling had halted the TPS termination while the litigation played out in court. He also issued a final ruling on September 5, finding that Noem’s actions to terminate the programme had violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies.
The judge also faulted Noem’s “discriminatory statements” concerning the Venezuelans, noting that she had generalised the alleged crimes of a few migrants “to the entire population of Venezuelan TPS holders”, calling her remarks a “classic form of racism”.
He added that members of that population “have lower rates of criminality and higher rates of college education and workforce participation than the general population”.
Chen’s ruling meant that more than 300,000 Venezuelan TPS holders would be able to remain in the country for now, even though Noem had determined their stay to be “contrary to the national interest”, according to the administration.
Trump has made cracking down on immigration – legal and illegal – a central plank of his second term as president, and he has moved to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees.
The TPS programme is a humanitarian designation under US law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes, giving recipients protection from deportation and access to work permits.
The US government under Biden designated Venezuelans as eligible for TPS in 2021 and 2023. Just days before Trump returned to office in January, Biden’s administration announced an extension of the programme to October 2026.
Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded that extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who had benefitted from the 2023 designation.
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put Chen’s final ruling on hold, prompting criticism from the administration.
Trump officials argued that the decision amounted to defiance of the Supreme Court, given its prior action in the 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,” the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court in its filing.
Some lower courts have expressed confusion and frustration in recent weeks as they attempt to follow Supreme Court emergency orders that often are issued with little or no legal reasoning presented.
“This court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts. Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them – as the lower courts did here – is unacceptable,” the Justice Department said.
In another case, the Supreme Court on May 30 let the administration revoke a different type of temporary legal status, “humanitarian parole”, for 532,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants.
Humanitarian parole is a form of temporary permission under US law to be in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”, allowing recipients to live and work in the country.