Supreme Court lets Trump strip protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants

WASHINGTON AP The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump s administration to strip legal protections from more than Venezuelan immigrants The justices issued an urgency order which will last as long as the court circumstance continues putting on hold a lower-court ruling by U S District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco that located the administration had wrongly ended temporary protected status for the Venezuelans The three liberal justices dissented Trump s Republican administration has moved to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the United States and work legally including ending TPS for a total of Venezuelans and Haitians who were granted protection under President Joe Biden a Democrat TPS is granted in -month increments In May the Supreme Court reversed a preliminary order from Chen that affected another Venezuelans whose protections expired in April The high court provided no explanation at the time which is common in emergency appeals The same aftermath that we reached in May is appropriate here the court wrote Friday in an unsigned order Particular movers have lost their jobs and homes while others have been detained and deported after the justices stepped in the first time lawyers for the immigrants explained the court I view in the current era s decision as yet another grave misuse of our exigency 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 Congress created TPS in to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters civil strife or other dangerous conditions The designation can be granted by the Homeland Measure secretary Chen uncovered that the Department of Homeland Protection acted with unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner for the preordained purpose of expediting termination of Venezuela s TPS status In earlier denying the Trump administration s crisis appeal Judge Kim Wardlaw wrote for a unanimous three-judge appellate panel that Chen determined that DHS made its decisions first and searched for a valid basis for those decisions second Solicitor General D John Sauer the administration s top Supreme Court lawyer had argued in the new court filing that the justices May order should also apply to the current development This circumstance is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court s orders on the crisis docket Sauer wrote The upshot he explained is that the new order just like the old one halted the vacatur and termination of TPS affecting over aliens based on meritless legal theories