The Supreme Court issued an emergency order, allowing the Trump administration to strip legal protections (Temporary Protected Status) from over 300,000 Venezuelan migrants, overturning a lower court's ruling and drawing dissent from liberal justices.
The Supreme Court on Friday granted an emergency order, enabling the Trump administration to remove Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. This decision puts on hold a lower-court ruling by U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, who had found the administration wrongly ended these protections. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticizing the court's "repeated, gratuitous and harmful interference" in cases where "lives hang in the balance." This ruling follows a similar May decision by the high court affecting another 350,000 Venezuelans. The Trump administration has consistently moved to withdraw various protections, including ending TPS for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. Lower courts had determined that the Department of Homeland Security acted "with unprecedented haste" and made decisions "first and searched for a valid basis for those decisions second." TPS, created by Congress in 1990, prevents deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife, or other dangerous conditions. Lawyers for the migrants noted that some have already lost jobs and homes, or faced detention and deportation, after the court's previous intervention.
