The United States Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major immigration win as he seeks to speed up mass deportations amid a scathing back-and-forth between the president and the high court.
The order will allow Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to strip away ‘temporary protected status’ (TPS) from 350,000 Venezuelan migrants.
Thousands of Venezuelan migrants have been living in the United States under the TPS program, which helps citizens of countries stricken by war or natural disaster get temporary work.
Their temporary protected status was extended under the Biden administration amid chaos under the Nicolás Maduro regime, but it was terminated by Kristi Noem.
In February, Noem ordered the TPS status extended to Venezuelans to be removed arguing that their presence in the U.S. is ‘contrary to the national interest.’
However, a judge in California blocked Noem’s action calling it ‘predicated on negative stereotypes’ and unconstitutional.
Liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was appointed by Joe Biden, was the only justice against the order giving Trump the green light to deport the migrants.
Trump has pledged to deport record numbers of illegal migrants in the United States sparking months of back-and-forth legal drama making its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Trump was slapped down by the Supreme Court in another case on Friday blocking his use of the 18th Century Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants held in detention in Texas.
Trump blasted that ruling on his Truth Social site over the weekend, calling it ‘a bad and dangerous day for America’ in his latest clash with the federal courts.
He said the decision ‘will let more CRIMINALS pour into our Country, doing great harm to our cherished American public.’
Even as he fumed at the majority, he heaped praise on conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas ‘for attempting to protect our Country.’
Trump and his top lieutenants have raged at lower court judges for slapping injunctions on administration policies with rulings that sometimes apply nationwide.
The TPS program is a humanitarian designation under U.S. law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophe, giving recipients living in the United States deportation protection and access to work permits. The designation can be renewed by the U.S. homeland security secretary.
The government under Biden twice designated Venezuela for TPS, in 2021 and 2023.
In January, days before Trump returned to office, the Biden administration announced an extension of the programs to 2026.
Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded the extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who benefited from the 2023 designation.
The Department of Homeland Security said about 348,202 Venezuelans were registered under that 2023 designation.
Noem is accused of violating a federal law that governs the actions of agencies.
The judge in California that struck down her move also said the revocation of the TPS status appeared to have been predicated on ‘negative stereotypes’ by insinuating the Venezuelan migrants were criminals.
‘Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes,’ Judge Chen wrote in a recent order.
He added that Venezuelan TPS holders were more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than American citizens and less likely to commit crimes than the general U.S. population.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 18 declined the administration’s request to pause the judge’s order.
Justice Department lawyers in their Supreme Court filing said Chen had ‘wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy’ away from the government’s executive branch, headed by Trump.
‘The court’s order contravenes fundamental Executive Branch prerogatives and indefinitely delays sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary,’ they wrote.
The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that granting the administration’s request ‘would strip work authorization from nearly 350,000 people living in the U.S., expose them to deportation to an unsafe country and cost billions in economic losses nationwide.’
The State Department currently warns against travel to Venezuela ‘due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure.’
The Trump administration in April also terminated TPS for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians in the United States. Those actions are not part of the current case.
