Supreme Court Allows Trump Admin To End Protected Status For Venezuelan Migrants

The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration on Friday to move forward with ending protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, an Obama appointee, found in September that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelan nationals violates the law.

“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the court’s order states. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”

In May, the Supreme Court lifted another order preventing the DHS from removing TPS for Venezuelan migrants.

“So long as the district court’s order is in effect, the Secretary must permit over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals to remain in the country, notwithstanding her reasoned determination that doing so even temporarily is ‘contrary to the national interest,’” the Trump administration wrote in its September application.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would not have granted the government’s request.

Jackson called the majority’s decision “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”

“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,” 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.”