The Supreme Court has given the Trump administration the green light to revoke temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants, overturning a lower court’s attempt to block the move.
Friday’s unsigned order wiped away a September ruling from U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, an Obama appointee, who had declared the Department of Homeland Security’s plan unlawful. The justices were blunt in their reasoning: “Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
This marks the second time in less than six months the Court has lifted a judicial roadblock to Trump’s immigration agenda, writes The Daily Caller. In May, the justices likewise cleared the way for DHS to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans, a program created to shield migrants from deportation when their home countries fall into crisis.
The administration argued that Judge Chen’s injunction amounted to judicial overreach. In its September filing, officials warned that the court order forced the secretary to allow “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.’”
Not all the justices agreed. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, as always, wishing they could have their policy preferences regardless of what the law says. Jackson, writing separately, blasted the majority for what she called a dangerous abuse of the Court’s emergency powers: “Yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” she wrote. By siding with the administration, Jackson said, the Court had “privileged the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.”
In a positive note, Justice Brown Jackson did appear to know the case the Court was ruling on this time around, which isn’t always the case.
TPS, born in the 1990s, has become a recurring flashpoint in the nation’s immigration battles. Venezuela was granted the designation during the collapse of its economy and political institutions. But the Trump administration has made clear that it intends to dismantle such protections wherever possible, casting them as open-ended amnesties.
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