The Supreme Court has granted President Donald Trump’s request to remove legal protections for Venezuelan nationals, opening them up to potential deportation.
The decision came in a brief order on May 19. It noted that the order was “without prejudice” toward a challenge to the policy implemented by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the administration’s request, according to the order. The Supreme Court’s block was temporary and allows the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to weigh in on the issue. If the justices take up the case for more thorough consideration, the stay will expire when they issue a judgment.
In early May, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to remove a lower court’s block on its decision to remove temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan nationals.
The order came after another decision on May 16 in which the Supreme Court blocked the president from deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, addressing the temporary legal protections case, told the Supreme Court in a brief on May 1 that a federal judge in California had overstepped his authority.
“The court contravened an express bar on judicial review, sidestepped black-letter law authorizing agencies to reverse as-yet-inoperative actions, and embraced a baseless equal-protection theory on the road to issuing impermissible universal relief that intrudes on central Executive Branch operations,” Sauer said.
He argued that the order “upsets the judgments of the political branches, prohibiting the executive branch from enforcing a time-sensitive immigration policy and indefinitely extending an immigration status that Congress intended to be” temporary.
The Ninth Circuit rejected the administration’s request for a stay of the lower court’s bar pending appeal.
The matter stems from a suit filed by the National Temporary Protected Status Alliance against Noem.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program was created by an act of Congress in 1990 and allows the Department of Homeland Security secretary to prevent deportation—and create a path to citizenship—for qualifying illegal immigrants who cannot return home safely.
Beginning in March 2021, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas awarded Venezuela TPS designation because it was “facing a severe humanitarian emergency,” marked by political conflict, food and medicine shortages, and “deepening poverty.”
The protected status for each branch of the program was renewed several times, in 18-month blocks. The latest extension was granted on January 17, just before Trump assumed office, and was set to expire in 2026.
Noem canceled the extension of the 2023 designation shortly after she was sworn in, which meant that branch of the program would end on April 7. The 2021 version of the program is set to continue until September.
California District Judge Edward Chen blocked the cancellation on March 31. He wrote in his opinion that statutes cited by Noem in court filings “do not give her the authority” to cancel the TPS extension for Venezuela, noting that such an extension had never been canceled in the program’s 35-year history.
Chen also wrote that Noem’s decision to cancel the program “for reasons of national security” was without evidence since “there is no evidence that Venezuelan TPS holders are members of the [Tren de Aragua] gang, have connections to the gang, and/or commit crimes.”
“Venezuelan TPS holders have lower rates of criminality than the general population,” he wrote.
“Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes.”
The administration argued that the judge had wrongly branded Trump and Noem as racists. In addition, individuals who were subject to removal could challenge, on an individual basis, whether their removal was proper, the administration said.
The lawsuit is one of many challenging Trump’s agenda on immigration. Just last week, the administration heard arguments over Trump’s birthright citizenship order and three nationwide injunctions blocking it. Those cases and others have raised questions about the balance of power between the judicial and executive branches.
Last week, Trump criticized the Supreme Court over its decision in one of the cases challenging his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang.
“The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“The result of this decision will let more CRIMINALS pour into our Country, doing great harm to our cherished American public.”
In that case, the Supreme Court said that the administration failed to give detained individuals enough time to challenge their proposed removal. The block could be removed and was “pending further proceedings.”
While the justices haven’t yet made a final ruling on whether Trump properly invoked the Alien Enemies Act against Tren de Aragua, they said in April that detainees were entitled to an opportunity to challenge their detention.
Stacy Robinson and Matthew Vadum contributed to this report.
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