Justices clear Trump to strip protected status from Venezuelan migrants

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court sided with President Donald Trump Friday in a tug-of-war over protected status for nearly 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the U.S., spurning lower courts facing the White House’s wrath.

In an unsigned statement, the court said legal arguments had not changed since May, when the justices previously ruled in favor of Trump in a nearly identical appeal.

“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the court wrote, declining to explain its decision further.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both Barack Obama appointees, said they would have denied the application.

Just like in May, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote a solo dissent arguing that the court was abusing its emergency docket.

“This court should have stayed its hand,” Jackson wrote. “Having opted instead to join the fray, the court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm" and was instead “privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our government has promised them.”

With a choice between allowing 300,000 people to remain working legally in the United States or subjecting those individuals to job loss, family separation and deportation, Jackson said the lower courts had chosen the obvious, least disruptive and most humane option.

“We once again eschew restraint … and wordlessly override the considered judgments of our colleagues,” Jackson wrote. “We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.”

Trump filed an impassioned emergency appeal asking the justices to let his administration strip temporary protected status from the migrants, who face dangerous conditions in Venezuela. According to the administration, the lower courts blocked the White House’s policy in defiance of a prior Supreme Court order.

The migrants called the accusations “baseless and dangerous,” arguing that the administration was misrepresenting the lower courts’ work. They warned the justices that allowing Trump to strip protected status would tear families apart and cause billions in economic losses, including Social Security and other tax revenue.

Following the Supreme Court’s May ruling, the lower courts held subsequent hearings in the case, concluding that when the case proceeds, the migrants should prevail.

On Sept. 5, Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen issued a final judgment finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sidestepped review requirements. The Barack Obama appointee called Noem’s actions unprecedented and illegal.

The Ninth Circuit refused to pause Chen’s September ruling, stating that the high court’s one-page, unexplained stay order from May left judges to guess at the justices’ view of the merits of the case. The appeals court reasoned that the more developed record bolstered the migrants’ claims against the government.

Lower court judges have reportedly become increasingly agitated by the Supreme Court’s scant explanations on the emergency docket. The administration, however, viewed what some judges called confusion as insubordination.

“This court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote. “Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them — as the lower courts did here — is unacceptable.”

Temporary Protected Status is a designation applied to nationals of certain countries where violence or economic duress make deportation difficult or unsafe. Venezuelans make up the largest number of such status holders in the nation.

Before leaving office, former President Joe Biden issued an 18-month extension of TPS for Venezuelans. In February, Noem revoked the extension, ending TPS status for almost 350,000 migrants.

During a Fox News interview, Noem called Venezuelan immigrants “dirtbags” and insinuated they were members of criminal gangs. Venezuela migrants and the National TPS Alliance, an immigrant advocacy group, sued the administration in February, claiming that Noem’s actions were unlawful and motivated by racial animus.

Chen ruled that Noem’s comments and actions against all beneficiaries showed that she made sweeping negative generalizations about Venezuelan TPS holders.

The Trump administration dismissed the claims, arguing that Noem’s actions were based on reasoned policy determinations. The Justice Department faulted Chen for stepping into the case, claiming that the ruling interfered with executive branch prerogatives and delayed sensitive policy decisions.

The migrants said interfering with Trump’s policy preferences did not meet the high standard for a stay, noting that the justices denied applications from the Biden administration on those same grounds.

“A temporary pause in implementing a policy change — even an important one — cannot by itself constitute irreparable harm,” the migrants wrote. “If it did, this court would have granted stays of the lower court orders that halted pro-immigrant federal policies promulgated during the Biden Administration. The same rules must apply now.”

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